Exercise 24: Virtual business worlds and cyberagents

1. Describe what software agents are.

Software agents are probably the fastest growing area of Information Technology (IT). They are being used, and touted, for applications as diverse as personalised information management, electronic commerce, interface design, computer games, and management of complex commercial and industrial processes. Despite this proliferation, there is, as yet, no commonly agreed upon definition of exactly what an agent is — Smith et al. (1994) define it as “a persistent software entity dedicated to a specific purpose”; Selker (1994) takes agents to be “computer programs that simulate a human relationship by doing something that another person could do for you”; and Janca (1995) defines an agent as “asoftware entity to which tasks can be delegated”. To capture this variety, a relatively loose notion of an agent as a self-contained program capable of controlling its own decision making and acting, based on its perception of its environment, in pursuit of one or more objectives will be used here. Within the extant applications, three distinct classes of agent can be identified. At the simplest level, there are “gopher” agents, which execute straightforward tasks based on pre-specified rules and assumptions (eg inform me when the share price deviates by 10% from its mean position or tell me when I need to reorder stock items). The next level of sophistication involves “service performing” agents, which execute a well defined task at the request of a user (eg find me the cheapest flight to Paris or arrange a meeting with the managing director some day next week). Finally, there are “predictive” agents, which volunteer information or services to a user, without being explicitly asked, whenever it is deemed appropriate (eg an agent may monitor newsgroups on the INTERNET and return discussions that it believes to be of interest to the user or a holiday agent may inform its user that a travel firm is offering large discounts on holidays to South Africa knowing that the user is interested in safaris).

Reference:J. L. Alty, D. Griffiths, N. R. Jennings, E. H. Mamdani, A. Struthers, and M. E. Wiegand (1994)
“ADEPT – Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks: Overview & Architecture” Proc.
BCS Expert Systems 94 Conference (Applications Track), Cambridge, UK, 359-371.

C. Guilfoyle and E. Warner (1994) “Intelligent Agents: The New Revolution in Software” Ovum
Report.

http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~mjw/pubs/iee-review96.pdf