Applications of intelligent agents

Intelligent agents are a new paradigm for developing software applications. More than this, agent-based computing has been hailed as ‘the next significant breakthrough in software development’ (Sargent, 1992), and ‘the new revolution in software’ (Ovum, 1994). Currently, agents are the focus of intense interest on the part of many sub-fields of computer science and artificial intelligence. Agents are being used in an increasingly wide variety of applications, ranging from comparatively small systems such as email filters to large, open, complex, mission critical systems such as air traffic control. At first sight, it may appear that such extremely different types of system can have little in common. And yet this is not the case: in both, the key abstraction used is that of an agent Our aim in this article is to help the reader to understand why agent technology is seen as a fundamentally important new tool for building such a wide array of systems. More precisely, our aims are five-fold: to introduce the reader to the concept of an agent and agent-based systems, to help the reader to recognize the domain characteristics that indicate the appropriateness of an agent-based solution, to introduce the main application areas in which agent technology has been successfully deployed to date, to identify the main obstacles that lie in the way of the agent system developer, and finally to provide a guide to the remainder of this book.

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