1.1 Introduction
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.
We begin, in this section, by introducing some basic concepts (such as, perhaps
most importantly, the notion of an agent). In Section 1.2, we give some general
guidelines on the types of domain for which agent technology ...