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Agents 101
Start here to learn about agents

A collection of items that offer an introduction or overview of key agent-related concepts and technologies. Some items courtesy of Keith Decker. See also the following AgentWeb categories:

Surveys

  • Hyacinth S. Nwana & Divine T. Ndumu (1999), "A Perspective on Software Agents Research", The Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol 14, No 2, pp 1-18. PDF

    This paper sets out, ambitiously, to present a brief reappraisal of software agents research. Evidently, software agent technology has promised much. However some five years after the word "agent" came into vogue in the popular computing press, it is perhaps time the efforts in this fledgling area are thoroughly evaluated with a view to refocusing future efforts. We do not pretend to have done this in this paper -- but we hope we have sown the first seeds towards a thorough first 5-year report of the software agents area. The paper contains some strong views not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community.

  • Mike Wooldridge and Nick Jennings, "The Pittfalls of Agent-Oriented Development", proceedings of the Second Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents'98), May 1998.

    "This paper identifies the main pitfalls that await the agent system developer, and, where possible, makes tentative recommendations on how to avoid them."

  • Nicholas R. Jennings and Michael J. Wooldridge, Applications Of Intelligent Agents, in Nicholas R. Jennings and Michael J. Wooldridge (Ed.), Agent Technology Foundations, Applications, and Markets , Springer-Verlag, 1998.

    From the back cover... "Agent Technology: Foundations, Applications, and Markets presents a coherent introduction to the basic technical issues, discusses future challenges, and reports on successes in designing and building agent applications. The chapters are written by internationally leading authorities in the field and give a unique account of potential and actual applications in such areas as telecommunications systems, personal digital assistants, information management, information economics, business applications, air traffic control, computer simulation, transportation management, and financial management. The book is written for a general audience in the information technology field. It can be expected to convince software engineers and IT managers that "Agents are the next major computing paradigm and will be pervasive in every market by the year 2000." (Janca, 1995)"

  • Software Agents, Edited by Jeffrey Bradshaw, Published by the AAAI Press/The MIT Press, 500 pp., $40.00 paper, 1997, ISBN 0-262-52234-9. "The book contains the most comprehensive and accessible collection of papers to date addressing these issues, authored by the leading researchers and developers of agent-based systems. Chapters by researchers from major universities (MIT, Stanford, University of Maryland, USC, University of Toronto), computing companies (Apple, Microsoft, and General Magic), and industrial research centers (AT&T Bell Labs, Boeing, EURISCO, Interval) not only summarize the state-of-the-art, but point the way in which standards and products incorporating agent technology are likely to evolve over the next few years. The wide variety of issues and approaches addressed make it an ideal resource for classroom use, as well as a reference for computing professionals. Because the book describes basic concepts and implementations without resorting to mathematical or overly technical terms, it will also be suitable for many non-computing professionals who are interested in a survey of this rapidly growing field."

  • Introduction to Software Agents, Jeffrey Bradshaw, in "Software Agents" ,AAAI Press/The MIT Press, 1997.

  • Hyacinth S. Nwana (1996), Software Agents: An Overview, The Knowledge Engineering Review Vol 11 (3). (postscript 2.6M). Agent software is a rapidly developing area of research. However, the 'overuse' of the word agent has tended to mask the fact that, in reality, there is a truly heterogeneous body of research being carried out under this banner. This overview paper presents a typology of agents. It places them in context, defines them and then goes on, inter alia, to overview critically the rationales, hypotheses, goals, challenges and state-of-the-art demonstrators of the various agent types in the typology. Hence, it attempts to make explicit much of what is usually implicit in the agents literature. It also proceeds to overview some other general issues which pertain to all the types of agents in the typology. This paper largely reviews software agents, and it also contains some strong opinions that are not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community. [42 pages] 10/1/96

  • Peter Stone and Manuela Veloso, "Multiagent Systems: A Survey from a Machine Learning Perspective", submitted IEEE-TKDE 1996

  • M. J. Wooldridge and N. R. Jennings, (1995), Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice, The Knowledge Engineering Review 10 (2) 115-152. ( postscript (273K), compresses postscript (114K))

  • Tim Finin, Yannis Labrou, and James Mayfield, KQML as an agent communication language, in Jeff Bradshaw (Ed.), ``Software Agents'', MIT Press, Cambridge (to appear 1997).

  • Software agents by Genesereth and Ketchpel

  • A. S. Rao and M. P. Georgeff, "Bdi agents: From theory to practice," Tech. Rep. 56, Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, Melbourne, Australia, Apr 1995. The study of computational agents capable of rational behaviour has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Theoretical formalizations of such agents and their implementations have proceeded in parallel with little or no connection between them. This paper explores a particular type of rational agent, a Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent. The primary aim of this paper is to integrate (a) the theoretical foundations of BDI agents from both a quantitative decision-theoretic perspective and a symbolic reasoning perspective; (b) the implementations of BDI agents from an ideal theoretical perspective and a more practical perspective; and (c) the building of large-scale applications based on BDI agents. In particular, an air-traffic management application will be described from both a theoretical and an implementation perspective.

  • Foundations of Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Greg O'Hare and Nick Jennings (Ed.), Sixth-Generation Computer Technology Series, John Wiley & Sons. The book includes 21 papers dived into four sections -- formulative readings; cooperation, coordination and agency; DAI frameworks and their applications; related disciplines, and includes an appendix on DAI references and resources. 8/10/96

  • Agent-Based Engineering, the Web, and Intelligence,Charles J. Petrie Stanford Center for Design Research, 1996. Abstract: We describe the use of KQML-like Agents and their compatibility with the World-Wide Web. One distinguishing characteristic of such agents is the necessity for a peer-to-peer protocol vs. the client-server protocol of HTTP. This is indicative of a major conflict between the web and agent paradigms that must be resolved for integration of the two technologies, both of which are useful for design and engineering applications. We also note that "intelligence" is not a necessary property of useful agents and is not helpful in distinguishing agents from other kinds of software. agent introduction web 5/31/96

  • Lenny Foner asks and answers the question What's an Agent, Anyway?. Foner uses Julia, a MUD robot, as an example to define a good software agent and discusses the sociology behind user acceptance of agents. It is also available in Postscript.

    Mobile Agents White Paper, Jim White, General Magic, 1996.

    Mobile Agents: Are they a good idea?, Colin Harrison, David Chess and Aaron Kershenbaum. Research report, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, March 1995.

  • B. Chaib-draa, B. Moulin, R. Mandiau, and P. Millot, "Trends in DAI", Kluwer Academic's AI Review-6(1)1992.

  • Ed Durfee, Victor Lesser, Dan Corkill, "Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving", The Handbook of AI, volume 4, 1989.

  • Keith Decker, "Distributed Problem Solving Techniques: A Survey", IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-17(5) 1987.

Applications

Closely related areas

Textbook/Collection

  • G.M.P. O'Hare and N.R. Jennings, "Foundations of Distributed Artificial Intelligence", Wiley Interscience, 1995

  • Alan H. Bond and Les Gasser, "Readings in Distributed Artificial Intelligence", Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, CA, 1988. (This book has all the classic papers from the early 80's)

  • Michael N. Huhns, ed., "Distributed Artificial Intelligence", Morgan Kaufmann, 1987.

  • Les Gasser and Michael N. Huhns, eds., "Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Volume II", Morgan Kaufmann, 1989.

  • Decentralized Artificial Intelligence, Y. Demazeau ed. 1990, Decentralized AI 2, Demazeau, Y. & Muller, J-P, eds. 1991, Decentralized AI 3, Werner & Demazeau eds. 1992, all published by Elsevier Science Publishers .

  • The Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages books, Volumes 1--3, Springer Verlag Intelligent Agents Series 1994-1996.

Special Issues

  • (Special Issue on Distributed AI) IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Vol. 11, No. 1, Jan 1981.

  • (Special Issue on Distributed AI---10 years later) IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Vol. 21, No. 6, Nov/Dec 1991.

  • (Special Issue on Intelligent and Cooperative Problem Solving) International Journal of Intelligent & Cooperative Information Systems, Vol. 1, No. 2, June 1992.

  • (Special Issue on Distributed AI) Group Decision and Negotiation, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1993.

Conference Proceedings

  • International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS). First, 1995-San Francisco, Second, 1996-Kyoto, Japan. MIT/AAAI Press

  • International Conference on Autonomous Agents, First, 1997-Marina del Rey, Second, 1998- Minneapolis. ACM Press.

Edited by Tim Finin & Yannis Labrou of UMBC ebiquity and the UMBC Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department. Comments to agentweb@agents.umbc.edu. Hits in red Who points to it? shows inverse links. Built by bk2site.