Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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Pro-activeness
. Agents do not simply act in response to their environment, they
are able to exhibit goal-directed opportunistic behaviour and take the initiative
when appropriate.
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Social ability
. Agents interact with other agents (and humans) via some kind of
agent-communication language when they recognise the necessity of such com-
munication (usually with the aim to complete their own problem solving and to
help others with their activities in a coordinated fashion).
Later, the same authors presented a further list of features ([54]) that emphasizes
cognitive functions that an agent should implement. Those include the following
functionalities:
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Maintaining an explicit model of the state of its environment, and perhaps its
own mental state as well.
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Raising and pursuing goals about the state of its environment, or its knowledge
of the state of the environment.
•
Perceiving events that occur in its environment, recognizing when its goals are
not currently satisfied.
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Establishing plans to acquire information about the environment and to create
changes, which will be consistent with its goals.
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Implementing these plans by acting upon the environment in order to bring
about the desired change.
The advantages that agent technology brings are understood in the context of coopera-
tion between a set of heterogeneous agents. A collection of agents which are able to
interact compose a
Multi-agent system
(MAS). MAS are collections of autonomous
agents that communicate between them to coordinate their activities in order to be able
to solve collectively a problem that could not been tackled by an agent individually.
Being inherently distributed, a MAS has the following interesting properties which
offer an added value over classical software engineering paradigms:
•
Modularity
: the different services or functionalities which are involved in a com-
plex problem may be divided, distributed and modelled among diverse agents,
depending on their complexity. In addition, a MAS allows for the interconnec-
tion and interoperation of multiple existing legacy systems. By building an agent
wrapper around such systems, they can be incorporated into an agent society.
•
Efficiency
: due to the parallel and concurrent nature of MAS execution, in which
each agent can be deployed in a separate computer node, it enhances overall sys-
tem performance, specifically along the dimensions of computational efficiency,
reliability, extensibility, robustness, maintainability, responsiveness, flexibility,
and reuse.
•
General performance
: a MAS can distribute computational resources and capabili-
ties across a network of computers in which a set of interconnected agents are
deployed. Whereas a centralized system may be plagued by resource limitations,
performance bottlenecks or critical failures, a MAS is decentralized and thus, does
not suffer from the single point of failure problem and the hardware bottlenecks
associated with centralised systems. Agent technology does not introduce special
hardware or software requirements and thus, they can take profit from already ex-
isting, obsolete and underused hardware resources of a computer network.
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