Software agents: state-of-the-art and possible applications

For more than two decades software agent technology represents one of rapidly developing areas of research. The main achievement of this trend of research was the development of new programming models that address both the basic features of agenthood (autonomy, reactivity, proactivity and social abilities) as well as more advanced, human-like features usually collectively coined in the agent literature as "mental attitudes" (beliefs, desires, intentions, commitments). Agent oriented technologies, engineering of agent systems, agent languages, development tools, and methodologies are an active and emergent research area. The recent challenge is to include agents in real software environments and widely use the agent paradigm in mainstream programming. In this paper we are going to give an overview of the rapidly developing area of software agents including: overview of the agent programming languages, tools and platforms; possible applications of intelligent and mobile software agents; agents in "Smart Environments".