Software Agent
An agent can be defined as one that acts or exerts
power . It cand be an autonomous , intelligent , collaborative ,adaptive ,
computational entity. Here , intelligence is the ability to infer and execute
needed actions , and seek and incorporate relevant information, give certain
goals.
Information access and navigation are today’s
major applications of software agents in the intranet , the internet and
extranet worlds, but there are other reasons why technology is expected to grow
rapidly.
1.Mundanepersonal
activity :
2.Search
and retrieval
3.
Repetitive office activity
4.Decision
support
5.Domain
experts.
Classification
of Software Agents :
Collaborative Agents
collaborative agents emphasise autonomy and
cooperation (with other agents) in order to perform tasks for their owners.
They may learn, but this aspect is not typically a major emphasis of their operation.
In order to have a coordinated set up of collaborative agents, they may have
to negotiate in order to reach mutually acceptable agreements on some
matters.
Interface Agents:
Interface agents emphasise autonomy and learning
in order to perform tasks for their owners. Pattie Maes, a key proponent of
this class of agents, points out that the key metaphor underlying interface
agents is that of a personal assistant who is collaborating with
the user in the same work environment.
Mobile Agents:
Mobile agents are computational software processes
capable of roaming wide area networks (WANs) such as the WWW, interacting with
foreign hosts, gathering information on behalf of its owner and coming back home having performed the duties set by
its user. These duties may range from a flight reservation to managing a
telecommunications network. However, mobility is neither a necessary nor
sufficient condition for agent hood.
Information/Internet Agents:
Information agents have come about because of the
sheer demand for tools to help us manage the explosive growth of information we
are experiencing currently, and which we will continue to experience
henceforth. Information agents perform the role of managing, manipulating or
collating information from many distributed sources.
Reactive Software Agents:
Reactive agents represent a special category of
agents which do not possess internal, symbolic models of their
environments; instead they act/respond in a stimulus-response manner to the
present state of the environment in which they are embedded. Reactive agents
work dates back to research such as Brooks (1986) and Agre & Chapman
(1987), but many theories, architectures and languages for these sorts of
agents have been developed since.
Hybrid Agents:
The debates as to which of them is ëbetterí are
rather academic, and frankly, sterile - and rather too early to get into. Since
each type has (or promises) its own strengths and deficiencies, the trick (as
always) is to maximise the strengths and minimise the deficiencies of the most
relevant technique for your particular purpose
Heterogeneous Agent Systems:
Heterogeneous agent systems, unlike hybrid systems
described in the preceding section, refers to an integrated set-up of at least
two or more agents which belong to two or more different agent classes. A
heterogeneous agent system may also contain one or more hybrid agents. As for
the other classes, we next discuss their motivation, benefit, how they work, an
example and some challenges.
Smart Agents
Smart Agents are those agents which can learn
,cooperate and are autonouous . In away all agents are smart . But for out
understanding ,when these three qualities are combined in an agent , we call it
smart .