Intelligent Software Agents

Software agent is a program that handles the behaviour of a user or software with the aid of an agency. The software agents are not called by a user or by a process, they are acting themselves, they decide the next task to do. This drives the system to the concept of intelligent agents.

Agent system is a system composed of several software agents. It provides the collective environment for making the goals possible for individual agent. It helps the agents to communicate and delegate the task. Although software agents are considered as autonomous, all agents operate on a human supervision.

For agent systems, there are no currently implemented commercial applications; however there are a lot of ongoing research projects in the software agents and agent systems area. I have read a couple of research papers in software agent systems and software agents. One of the research papers is focussing on the different architectures behind the software agent systems. The other research paper is about different implications of the software agents for different scenarios.

Software agents and agent systems will be the key elements in information technology. They will solve many problems of information overload and this will change the human computer interaction. It will also change the way we develop software for large systems.

It is possible to use modern agent platforms to implement large scale agent systems. They are some working applications of software agents in an e-commerce system and software agents as a resource broker in the grid. I will try to investigate on different types of software agents and their implications.

There are different types of agent systems. Intelligent agents are capable of modifying their behaviour based on their learning and reasoning. Distributed agents are executed physically in distinct machines. Multi-agent systems are basically distributed agents that are not capable of doing alone the objective. They need to talk and... [continues]

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