From theoretical and practical viewpoints, the application of intelligent software agents is a topic of major interest. There has been a growing interest not only in new methodologies for development of intelligent software agents, but also the way in which these methodologies can be supported by theories and practice. Intelligent Agent Software Engineering focuses on addressing the theories and practices associated with implementing intelligent software agents.
Build your own intelligent agent system... Intelligent agent technology is a tool of modern computer science that can be used to engineer complex computer programmes that behave rationally in dynamic and changing environments. Applications range from small programmes that intelligently search the Web buying and selling goods via electronic commerce, to autonomous space probes. This powerful technology is not widely used, however, as developing intelligent agent software requires high levels of training and skill. The authors of this book have developed and tested a methodology and tools for developing intelligent agent systems. With this methodology (Prometheus) developers can start agent-oriented designs and implementations easily from scratch saving valuable time and resources. Developing Intelligent Agent Systems not only answers the questions “what are agents?” and “why are they useful?” but also the crucial question: “how do I design and build intelligent agent systems?” The book covers everything a practitioner needs to know to begin to effectively use this technology - including an introduction to the notion of agents, a description of the concepts involved, and a software engineering methodology. Read on for: a practical step-by-step introduction to designing and building intelligent agent systems. a full life-cycle methodology for developing intelligent agent systems covering specification, analysis, design and implementation of agents. PDT: Prometheus Design Tool – software support for the Prometheus design process. the example of an electronic bookstore to illustrate the design process throughout the book. Electronic resources including the Prometheus Design Tool (PDT), can be found at: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/agents/prometheus This book is aimed at industrial software developers, software engineers and at advanced undergraduate students. It assumes knowledge of basic software engineering but does not require knowledge of Artificial Intelligence or of mathematics. Familiarity with Java will help in reading the examples in chapter 10.
This monograph presents a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey on approaches to the design of intelligent agents. On the theoretical side, the author identifies a set of general requirements for autonomous interacting agents and provides an essential step towards understanding the principles of intelligent agents. On the practical side, the novel agent architecture InteRRaP is introduced: the detailed description and evaluation of this architecture is an ideal guideline and case study for software engineers or researchers faced with the task of building an agent system. The book uniquely bridges the gap between theory and practice; it addresses active and novice researchers as well as practitioners interested in applicable agent technology.
This volume is an attempt to capture the essence of the state-of-the-art of intelligent agent technology and to identify the new challenges and opportunities that it is or will be facing. The most important feature of the volume is that it emphasizes a multi-faceted, holistic view of this emerging technology, from its computational foundations OCo in terms of models, methodologies, and tools for developing a variety of embodiments of agent-based systems OCo to its practical impact on tackling real-world problems. Contents: Formal Agent Theories; Computational Architecture and Infrastructure; Learning and Adaptation; Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Agents; Distributed Intelligence; Agent Based Applications. Readership: Graduate students in computer science and engineering, academics/lecturers, researchers, software/systems engineers, IT engineers and industrialists."
Intelligent agents are one of the most important developments in computer science of the past decade. Agents are of interest in many important application areas, ranging from human-computer interaction to industrial process control. The ATAL workshop series aims to bring together researchers interested in the core/micro aspects of agent technology. Speci?cally, ATAL addresses issues such as theories of agency, software architectures for intelligent agents, methodologies and programming languages for r- lizing agents, and software tools for applying and evaluating agent systems. One of the strengthsoftheATALworkshopseriesisitsemphasisonthesynergiesbetweentheories, languages, architectures, infrastructures, methodologies, and formal methods. This year s workshop continued the ATAL trend of attracting a large number of high quality submissions. In more detail, 71 papers were submitted to the ATAL 2000 workshop, from 21 countries. After stringent reviewing, 22 papers were accepted for publication and appear in these proceedings. As with previous workshops in the series, we chose to emphasize what we perceive asimportantnewthemesinagentresearch. Thisyear sthemeswerebothassociatedwith the fact that the technology of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems is beginning to migrate from research labs to software engineering centers. As agents are deployed in applications such as electronic commerce, and start to take over responsibilities for their human users, techniques for controlling their autonomy become crucial. As well, the availability of tools that facilitate the design and implementation of agent systems becomes an important factor in how rapidly the technology will achieve widespread use.
Intelligent Agents with Java(TM) A Programmer's Guide to Smarter Applications Add Artificial Intelligence to your Java applications * Learn to design and implement agent-based reasoning, modeling, and learning * Build your own personal assistants, Web agents, e-commerce agents, and multiagent systems. Learn how to create intelligent agents that can automate, mediate, and administer basic business functions. Java makes it easier than ever for programmers to build complex agents that reason and learn. In this book, enterprise programming experts Joe and Jennifer Bigus show you how to take advantage of Java's advanced features to differentiate your applications and build the smartest high-powered applications possible. The authors explain the principles of Al program design using Java's object-oriented features and present the essential AI algorithms used to develop agents that reason, model, and learn to adapt to the world around them. They then show how to apply these algorithms and techniques in practical "real-world" distributed computing applications. They develop an intelligent agent architecture and use it to construct several agent-enhanced programs, including a PC management agent, an adaptive Internet news reader that filters articles based on user preferences, and an electronic marketplace application where agents do the buying and selling. The enclosed CD-ROM gives you: * Complete source code for Java implementations of AI search algorithms, rule-based inferencing, and neural network learning * Java source code for three practical intelligent agent applications * The IBM Agent Building Environment (ABE) Developer's Toolkit
One of the most important reasons for the current intensity of interest in agent technology is that the concept of an agent, as an autonomous system capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisfy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. Just as we can understand many systems as being composed of essentially passive objects, which have a state and upon which we can perform operations, so we can understand many others as being made up of interacting semi-autonomous agents. This book brings together revised versions of papers presented at the First International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2000, held in Limerick, Ireland, in conjunction with ICSE 2000, and several invited papers. As a comprehensive and competent overview of agent-oriented software engineering, the book addresses software engineers interested in the new paradigm and technology as well as research and development professionals active in agent technology.
Over the past three decades, software engineers have derived a progressively better understanding of the characteristics of complexity in software. It is now widely recognised thatinteraction is probably the most important single char- teristic of complex software. Software architectures that contain many dyna- cally interacting components, each with their own thread of control, and eng- ing in complex coordination protocols, are typically orders of magnitude more complex to correctly and e?ciently engineer than those that simply compute a function of some input through a single thread of control. Unfortunately, it turns out that many (if not most) real-world applications have precisely these characteristics. As a consequence, a major research topic in c- puter science over at least the past two decades has been the development of tools and techniques to model, understand, and implement systems in which interaction is the norm. Indeed, many researchers now believe that in future computation itself will be understood as chie?y a process of interaction.
