Agent technologies and their application to Mobile

Computing

Lecturer :
Dr. Drake Patrick Mirembe,
E:[email protected]
Website: www.drakemirembe.org
 Presentation Overview
1. Agents overview
2. Introduction to Agent
technologies
3. Mobile agent Technology
4. Software agent
Technology
5. KAoS Agent Technology
 Agents overview
1. Description
2. Characteristics of an agent
3. Classification of agents
4. Applications of agents
 • An agent is anything that perceives it’s
environment through sensors and act
upon the environment through actuators
“ — Russell & Norving
• Agent uses various sensors to view an
environment and uses actuators to act
upon that environment, for-example
• Humans are agents, human agents
have eyes, ears & other organs as
sensors & hands, legs as actuators.
• Robotic agents may have cameras &
The term agent is original of the Artificial Infrareds as sensors and various motors
Intelligence (AI) community, and its notion is as actuators
central to the definition of AI itself. A common • Software agents receive keystrokes, file
definition for AI is 'the sub-field of computer
content & network packets as sensory
science that aims at the construction of agents
that exhibit aspects of intelligent behaviour' inputs and acts on that environment by
(Wooldridge, 1994a). displaying contents on the screen
An Agent runs in cycles;
1. It perceives its environment
2. It thinks about that environment
3. Acts on that environment
• An agent behavior can be described by agents function that maps any
given percepts sequence to an action. The map would be stored in a
tabular way
• For-example lets look at the Robot vacuum cleaner.
• Vacuum cleaner is perceiving its environment through its senses, thinking
or determining if the tile is clean or not, making decisions using its suction
as an actuator to act upon that environment by sucking up the dirt. That’s
what an agent is.
Characteristics of an agent
• Autonomy: agents should be able to perform the majority of their problem solving tasks
without the direct intervention of humans or other agents, and they should have a
degree of control over their own actions and their own internal state.
• Social ability: agents should be able to interact, when they deem appropriate, with
other artificial agents and humans in order to complete their own problem solving and to
help others with their activities. This requires that agents have, as a minimum, a means
by which they can communicate their requirements to others and an internal mechanism
for deciding when social interactions are appropriate (both in terms of generating
appropriate requests and judging incoming requests).
• Responsiveness: agents should perceive their environment (which may be the physical
world, a user, a collection of agents, the INTERNET, etc.) and respond in a timely fashion
to changes which occur in it.
• Proactiveness: agents should not simply act in response to their environment,
they should be able to exhibit opportunistic, goal-directed behaviour and take the
initiative where it is appropriate.
• adaptability - the ability of an agent to modify its behaviour over time in response
to changing environmental conditions or an increase in knowledge about its
problem solving role
• In additionally, agent may have other features. Intelligent, knowledge, rationality,
mobility etc.
Classes of an agent
• COLLABORATIVE AGENT:-An agent which collaborates with other agents to
carry out an intended task. Other agents in this category can be Reactive agents,
collaborative
• INTERFACE AGENT: An interface agent can be considered as a program that
can also affect the objects in a direct manipulation interface, but without explicit
instruction from the user
• INFORMATION AGENT: Information agents are special kind of so-called
intelligent software agents
• REACTIVE AGENT: Capable of maintaining an ongoing interaction with the
environment, and responding in a timely fashion to changes that occur in it.
• SMART AGENT: new forms of software agent that interface with other agents
forming an artificial Intelligence system. The acronym” SMART” stands for “System
for Managing Agents in Real Time”.
• INTELLIGENT AGENT: The term intelligent agent can refer to any agent that
exhibits some amount of intelligence and there is no requirement that the agent
have the ability to work with other agents.
• COURIER AGENT which transfers a folder to a specified agent on a specific
machine.
Classes of an agent
• DIFFUSION AGENT, which executes an agent locally and then creates a clone of
itself at every site. Scheduling allows the enforcement of policies that tells when
and where an agent is executed .
• This scheduling is implemented by BROKER AGENT, which maintains the
database of service providers. An Agent needs a given service to always consult a
broker to identify which agent provides that service.
• REAR GUARD AGENT, it is possible that sites in a computer network will fail.
When such a failure occurs, agents at that site will no longer be continuing
execution. To solve this problem a REAR GUARD AGENT can be deployed so that
the execution can proceed. This agent follows the execution process which moves
from one site to another. When an agent fails, this REAR GUARD AGENT launches a
new agent. On resumption, this REAR GUARD Agent terminates its own action.
Applications of Agents
1. Personalization in Medicine and HealthCare
• Personalized medicine and healthcare promise prediction, prevention and treatment
of illness that is targeted to patients’ needs
• Personalized medicine is oriented towards the collecting of information from the
patient in order to better tailor his/her needs.
• Rapid increase of use of smartphones and 3G and 4G networks has triggered
expanded use of health devices and influenced a lot of different medical aspects
like healthcare of aging people. Low-cost sensors have led to their integration into
a wide range of wearable devices. So through smartphones and tablets patients can
access different health data and monitor their daily activities.
• Healthcare wearables are those wearables for measuring metrics that are assumed
to provide an indication of a patient’s health and state of wellbeing. Recently there
has been the emergence of wearables that are able to monitor detailed clinical
metrics, such as blood pressure, heart function, glucose and insulin levels, and
medicine intake and so on.
• Agent technologies play important role and can significantly help in developing
higher-quality services.
Applications of Agents
2. Electronic Market
• Electronic markets may be considered as hybrid systems, in which people and
computers are working together in order to reach certain commercial results.
• Agents may be used in all phases of a market transaction as:
- Information - the main purpose is to search for, find, filter and present
information required both by potential customers and potential suppliers.
- Trading/matching - the main purpose is to support the tasks involving
negotiations. Agents, on behalf of the buyer, could negotiate with suppliers the
terms and conditions of delivery and payment, warranties, and the execution or
offering of additional services.
- Settlement - agents could act both by: • providing electronic payment and
following the occurrence of derived transaction processes related to the deal as
packaging, storage, shipping, insurance, customs clearance,
Applications of Agents
3. Flexible Information systems
• The demand for tools to manage the vast amount of information has come with the
explosive growth of network information systems, such as the one that can be
found in the World Wide Web (WWW).
• The provision of information is a key prerequisite for a successful distributed
information system.
• There is the need to concentrate on what can be done to supply the user with the
required information, so that communications problems, location of the data, the
amount of data to be manipulated, among other issues do not interfere with an
adequate provision.
• Agent technology could play a major role in this context allowing the construction
of Flexible Information Systems that can operate autonomously or in cooperation
with other systems in order to satisfy the specific goals of users and applications
supporting distributed information services over an heterogeneous distributed
processing environment
• Information agents could be created and launched by the user's computational
environment in order to travel through the information network and bring
information.
Applications of Agents
4. Mobile Communication and Mobile Computing
• In the light of an increasing number of wired and wireless communication services
available for accessing and exchanging information, the vision for future communications,
i.e "information anytime, any place in any form", is becoming a reality.
• This new paradigm is already manifesting itself as users travel to many different locations
with laptops, PDAs , cellular telephones, and so on.
• Mobile Computing Systems are a combination of the following three elements {Mazer,
1995}:
• Stationary computer and network devices, which we will call the "infrastructure";
• Mobile computers, of varying physical properties ( such weight, size, and power) and
computational capabilities
• Wireline and wireless communications channels of varying bandwidth, cost, reliability,
and service properties.
motivations for using mobile agents in this mobile environment {Chess,1995}
• Support to lightweight devices;
• necessity of asynchronous methods of searching for information or transaction services;
• the reduction of overall communication traffic over the diverse communication channels
that a mobile device may encounter;
• the ability of the agent to engage in a efficient communication with remote servers;
• the ability of the simple mobile computer to interact with complex applications, without
necessarily knowing the remote server capabilities;
• the ability to create "personalized services" for the user, by tailoring the agents that move
to the server and respond to the user's requests.
Other Applications of Agents
The number of agent based applications being developed and deployed in real world
settings is rapidly increasing. Exemplar systems from the field of information
management, one of the fastest growing application areas, include:
• The White House has a system which uses intelligent agents to automatically
retrieve information in response to the hundreds of requests that it receives via
INTERNET everyday (cited in Houlder, 1994). Agents are used to match keywords
in the email received with relevant mailing lists of which they are aware.
• The Commander Exception Monitor (produced by Andersen Consulting and
Comshare) uses agents to filter information (cited in Houlder, 1994). This product
has been used by Hertz, the car rental company, to analyse pricing structures in the
car rental business. By excluding trivial changes, the system reduces the equivalent
of 28,000 spreadsheets of information about prices, locations, sizes and type of car
into something that can easily be monitored by its pricing executives.
• AT&T’s PersonaLink (and the as yet unnamed IBM Intelligent Communication
Services system) are both based on agent technology (Reinhardt, 1994). The
former uses agents to filter messages and search for information on a network,
while the latter is an umbrella for smart message routing.
 Introduction to agent technologies
• AI technology was born in 1956. AI technologies are actually very much inspired by the
nature(ANN — model of brain, genes and chromosomes etc.).
• AI also has no single definition for intelligence. Some definitions of AI organized into 4
categories, which known as four schools of thoughts
- Acting humanly/ Acting rationally / Thinking humanly / Acting rationally
• The modern approach to AI is considered as building machines to do right thing(Acting
rationally).
• In the future, The gap between man-machine will reduce and lead to man-machine
coexistent. In order to enable these development among other AI technologies, Agent
technology has done a breakthrough.

Motivation for Agent technology

• When we notice the real world (especially the modern world) which we find very
dynamic, interconnected, distributed, uncertain, involves many entities. A system with
such features is called a complex systems.
• In a complex system, [ 1 + 1 > 2 ]. It means, performances of two entities together are
higher than addition of performances of individuals(Team work).
• Complex system has another main feature, that removing a component of a system is
does not destroy the system, i.e. still survive; otherwise call a complicated system.
• AI has introduced agent technology ( multi agent technology ) to model any complex
system
 Agent technologies in detail
1. Mobile Agent Technology
Mobile agent technology has been promoted as an emerging technology that makes it
much easier to design, implement, and maintain distributed systems, including cloud
computing and sensor networks. It does not provide an infrastructure for only executing
autonomous agents but also migrating them between computers.

What is a Mobile Agent?

• Mobile agents are autonomous, intelligent programs that move through a network,
searching for and interacting with services on behalf of user. The agent can suspend its
execution, migrate to another machine, and then resume execution on the new machine
from the point at which it left off.
• Before the advent of Mobile agents, the communication between the client and
server is achieved by different approaches such as message passing, Remote
Procedure Call (RPC) and Remote Evaluation (REV).
• In RPC method, the procedure resides in the server and client sends a data to the
procedure that will be executed there, finally the result is back to the client
• In REV approach which is different from the RPC, the procedure itself will be sent and
the desired result is returned to the client
 Agent technologies in detail
Considering the client /Server model as a driver for mobile agents
• We’re examining a scenario where a server provides services to a client
• when a client needs a service, it usually sends a request message to the server as
shown in fig. 1 through a communication channel whether it is wired or wireless
• In case, the server does not have resources to satisfy the request made by the client,
the client sends request to other server having the needed resource to satisfy the
client
• This usually increases the inefficient use of network bandwidth.
• This also increases the network traffic and causes delays due to the involvement of
more servers. These factors prohibit the widespread use of this model in a mobile
device, because disconnection is frequent in the wireless environment.
 Agent technologies in detail
Considering the client /Server model as a driver for mobile agents
• Mobile agent provides solution for this mobile device because they do not depend on
the server operation
• Once the mobile agent has migrated, the connection between the client and server is
disconnected, later when mobile agent finishes its job at the server, then it will
reconnect to the client or host with the result shown in fig.2.
• This clearly saves the network bandwidth especially in the wireless environment where
disconnection is frequent and bandwidth play a major role (“International Journal of
Artificial Intelligence & Applications (IJAIA), Vol.3, No.5, September 2012”)
 Agent technologies in detail
Mobile Agent Characteristics
• Autonomous: An agent is able to take initiative and exercise a non-trivial degree of
control over its own actions.
• Interactive: means Mobile Agents should communicate with other agents and their
environment.
• mobility is the most important property in the Mobile Agent concept, where agent
migrated from one node to another within the same environment or in different
environment.
• Coordinative; means perform data transfer with other agents in a given environment.
• Proxy: Mobile agents may act on behalf of someone, so they should have certain
degree of autonomy.
• Ragged: Mobile Agents should have the ability to deal with the errors whenever
occurred.
• Proactive: means they should be goal oriented.
• Cooperative: means coordinate with other agents to achieve a common goal. Mobile
Agents should have the capability of learning the current environment and modify its
behaviour based on this information.
• Intelligent: means Mobile Agent should be too smart in order to act efficiently.

NOTE: It is not required that agents have all these properties .This is determined by the
purpose that agents have to achieve.
Agent technologies in detail
 Agent technologies in detail
Types of Mobility
1. Remote execution
- the agent is sent before it starts to be executed
- when it arrives at destination , it is executed until it finishes, agent is transferred once
- when it is executing, it can use the same remote execution mechanism to start the execution of
other agents
- Destination of the agent is determined by the execution starter
2. Weak migration
- agent can do a weak migration by sending its data along with its code
- this scheme allows to choose which part of data will be transferred to the new location of the
agent.
3. strong migration
- this is the highest degree of mobility
- using this scheme, not only agent code and data is sent but also the state of execution.
- when the agent arrives to destination, it is fully restored and its execution is resumed from the
same execution point it was just before migration.
 Agent technologies in detail
What happens if the agent itself is big?
• If agent technologies had big agents with lots of code inside, results would not be as
good as expected.
• GH99 is a programming model called FOAM (Fragmented Object Agent Model) based
on the object model of AspectIX architecture and with a communication layer, CORBA
(Common Object Request Broker Architecture) compliant, beneath
• Using FOAM, an agent doesn’t have to be completely transferred during migration but
only the required fragment to fulfil the required tasks at the destination agency.

Technological considerations in Mobile agent Technology

Having mobile agents working on mobile devices involves a set of technological
components that should provide the expected functionality when all of them work
together.

A . Wireless communications
• Mobile devices communicate by using radio signals
• Two most commonly used protocols today for local wireless technologies:
- Bluetooth
- Wi-Fi
 Agent technologies in detail
• Bluetooth
• was designed for small devices, such as cell phones and PDAs
• it is normally used for the transmission of small amounts of data or to connect to nearby
compatible peripherals (e.g., printers, keyboards, or hands-free headsets).
• It has a limited bandwidth (maximum 3 Mbps), a range of up to 100 meters, and low power
consumption.

• Wi-Fi networks
• based on the IEEE 802.11 standards
• allow to expand traditional Ethernet local area networks to places where either cabling is not an
option or mobility is desired or needed.
• Its popularity is growing very fast and almost every laptop computer made in the last years has a
Wi-Fi interface which allows it to connect to an also increasing number of public access networks
in places such as hotels, airports and restaurants.
• Compared to Bluetooth, it has a higher bandwidth (54 Mbps), a similar range, and a higher power
consumption and cost.
 Agent technologies in detail
B . Mobile Devices
Mobile devices could be classified in three basic types:
• Cell phones. They are small, light, cheap and with little computation capabilities. Data
communications can be carried out through mobile phone networks or via bluetooth. Mobile phone
networks have a variable bandwidth depending on the transmission technology (4G, 3G, GSM,
GPRS, UMTS, etc.) and are available almost everywhere, but using these networks has an
economic cost.
• PDAs or pocket computers. They are bigger and more expensive than cell phones, but they also
have better processing capabilities. There are many architectures (ARM, MIPS, Xscale, etc.) and
several operating systems that allow the execution of end user applications similar to those
available in desktop computers. Communications can be established through Bluetooth, and more
recently also via Wi-Fi.
• Laptop computers. They have capabilities comparable to those of desktop computers. They usually
have both Ethernet and Wi-Fi interfaces, but it is also possible to use Bluetooth for data
interchange with small devices.

Currently, the three types of mobile devices mentioned above are starting to mix.
• cell phones and PDAs are converging into a single device, called Smartphone (PDA with a SIM
card), being the Apple iPhone one of the most popular Smartphones nowadays.
• laptops and PDAs are mixing into the so-called Netbooks, which have less computing capabilities
than a conventional PC but also have a lower cost. Another advantage of Netbook is that most of
them (like the Asus Eee PC, or the Acer Aspire One) have the samex86 architecture than PCs and
can use the same operating systems and applications.
 Agent technologies in detail
B . Mobile Devices
Considerations for mobile agent based applications for use in Wireless and
Mobile environment
 Features related to security, since the use of wireless communications broadcast data
that could be intercepted or altered without having any notice.
 Features related to special network topologies, since there may be multiple mobile
nodes with short range and unstable communications, which can make the process of
transferring data between two nodes challenging.
 Features related to the way the platform itself works, since the mobile agents need
different services, such as transportation or communication services.
 Features that should help the developer of agent-based systems, such as monitoring
or debugging tools.

Security in Mobile agent Technology

Most security issues in mobile agents are common to existing computer security problems
in communication and the downloading of software.

There are two problems in mobile agent security:

1. the protection of hosts from malicious mobile agents
2. the protection of mobile agents from malicious hosts.
 Agent technologies in detail
Security in Mobile agent Technology
 It is difficult to verify with complete certainty whether an incoming agent is malicious
or not. However, there are two solutions to protecting hosts from malicious mobile
agents.

1. The first is to provide access-control mechanisms, e.g., Java’

’s security manager.
They explicitly specify the permission of agents and restrict any agent behaviours that
are beyond their permissions.

2. To provide authentication mechanisms by using digital signatures or authentication

systems. They explicitly permit run time systems to only receive agents that have
been authenticated, have been sent from authenticated computers, or that have
originated from authenticated computers

 There have been no general solutions to these second problem, because it is

impossible to keep agent private from runtime systems executing the agent. However,
(non -malicious) runtime systems can authenticate the destinations of their agents, to
check whether these are non-malicious, before they migrate the agents to these
destinations
 Agent technologies in detail
Applications for Mobile Agent Technology
1. Remote information retrieval - agents can migrate among multiple database
servers to retrieve and gather the interesting data from the servers. They can also
determine the destinations based on information they have acquired from the
database servers that they have thus far visited.
2. Network management – Mobile agent-based network management has several
advantages in comparison with traditional approaches, such as the client/server one.
• As code is very often smaller than the data it processes, the transmission of mobile
agents to sources of data creates less traffic than transferring the data itself.
Deploying a mobile agent close to the network nodes that we want to monitor and
control prevents delays caused by network congestion.
• Since a mobile agent is locally executed on the node it is visiting, it can easily access
the functions of devices on this node.
• The dynamic deployment and configuration of new or existing functionalities into a
network system are extremely important tasks, especially as they potentially allow out
dated systems to be updated in an efficient manner.
• Network management systems must often handle networks that may have various
malfunctions and disconnections and whose exact topology may not be known. Since
mobile agents are autonomous entities, they may be able to detect proper
destinations or routings on such networks.
 Agent technologies in detail
Applications for Mobile Agent Technology
3. Cloud computing – In a distributed system, e.g. a grid or cloud computing system,
computers tend to be numerous and their computational loads are different. Since mobile
agents can migrate to other computers, tasks that are implemented as mobile agents can
be relocated at suitable computers whose processors can execute the tasks. This is
practical in implementing massively multi agent systems that must operate a huge
number of agents, which tend to be dynamically created or which terminate on a
distributed system that consists of heterogeneous computers
4. Mobile computing - Mobile agents use the capabilities and resources of remote servers
to process their tasks. When a user wants to do tasks beyond the capabilities of his or her
computers, the agents that perform the tasks can migrate to and be executed at a remote
server.

5. Software testing
Mobile agents are useful in the development of software as well as the operation of software
in distributed and mobile computing settings. An example of these applications is testing
methodology for software running on mobile computers, called Flying Emulator. Wireless LANs
or 4G-networks incorporate wireless LAN technologies, and mobile terminals can access the
services provided by LANs, as well as global network services.
 Agent technologies in detail
Applications for Mobile Agent Technology
6. Active networking
There are two approaches to implementing active networks. The active packet approach
replaces destination addresses in the packets of existing architectures with miniature
programs that are interpreted at nodes on arrival. The active node approach enables new
protocols to be dynamically deployed at intermediate and end nodes using mobile code
techniques. Mobile agents are very similar to active networks, because a mobile agent can be
regarded as a specific type of active packet, and an agent platform in traditional networks can
be regarded as a specific type of active node.
7. Active Documents
Mobile code technology is widely used in plug-in modules for rich internet applications (RIA)
in web-browsers, e.g., Java Applet and Macromedia Flash. Such modules provide us with
interactive user experiences because their virtual machines, e.g., Java virtual machines and
Flash players, can locally execute and render them across multiple platforms and browsers
without having to communicate with remote servers.
Mobile agent-based modules for RIA can naturally carry both their code and state at client
computers. For example, MobiDoc is a mobile agent-based framework for building mobile
compound documents where a compound document can be dynamically composed of mobile
agent-based components, which view or edit their contents, e.g., text, images, and movies. It
can migrate itself over a network as a whole, with all its embedded components.

.
 Agent technologies in detail
Applications for Mobile Agent Technology
8. AMBIENT COMPUTING - Ambient computing is one of the most important applications
of mobile agents and mobile agents is useful in building and operating ambient computing
environments. Ambient computing environments, which consist of computers often have
limited resources, such as restricted levels of CPU power and amounts of memory. Mobile
agents can help to conserve these limited resources, since each agent only needs to be
present at the computer when the computer needs the services provided by that agent.

One of the most typical application of mobile agent technology in ambient computing is
“follow-me” application, which tracks the current location of the user and allows him/her to
access his/her applications at the nearest computer as he/she moves around in the building.
 Agent technologies in detail
Challenges of mobile Agents include the following:
Transportation: how does an agent move from place to place? How does it pack up and
move?
Authentication: how do you ensure the agent is who it says it is, and that it is
representing who it claims to be representing? How do you know it has navigated various
networks without being infected by a virus?
Secrecy: how do you ensure that your agents maintain your privacy? How do you ensure
someone else does not read your personal agent and execute it for his own gains? How do
you ensure your agent is not killed and its contents „core-dumped‟?
Security: how do you protect against viruses? How do you prevent an incoming agent from
entering an endless loop and consuming all the CPU cycles?
Cash: how will the agent pay for services? How do you ensure that it does not run amok
and run up an outrageous bill on your behalf? In addition to these are the following:
Performance issues: what would be the effect of having hundreds, thousands or millions
of such agents on a WAN?
Interoperability/communication/brokering services: how do you provide
brokering/directory type services for locating engines and/or specific services? How do you
execute an agent written in one agent language on an agent engine written in another
language? How do you publish or subscribe to services, or support broadcasting necessary for
some other coordination approaches?
 Take home for Mobile agent technology
• Mobile agent technology provides a new way of communication over heterogonous
network environment. A number of advantages have been proposed and identified
which includes:
• efficiency and reduction of network traffic, asynchronous autonomous interaction,
interaction with real-time entities, local processing of data, support for
heterogeneous environment and having robust and fault-tolerant behaviour.
• However, the security, infrastructure and standardising issues still represent
significant constraints.
• mobile agent technology has the potential in increasing the performance of
networks as well as for software adopting mobile agents. Due to its nature of being
a futuristic technology from the programming environment perspective a lot of
work is still required before the average programmer can build applications based
on the mobile agent technology paradigm with ease.
 Agent technologies in detail
2. SOFTWARE AGENT TECHNOLOGIES
Introduction
Since the 1980’s, the metaphor of “agents” has been used to create and handle
software products in a variety of application domains. Although the “killer” application
is still missing, software agents have undergone a remarkable development. Agent
concepts improve the way in which software is developed, and extend the range of
applications by making solutions for problems feasible that were barely solvable using
traditional technologies.

What is a software agent?

Software agents can be generally defined as entities that function continuously and
autonomously in a particular environment that is often inhabited by other agents and
processes.

Types of software agents

Agent can be classified in many ways according to service offers.
1. Agent could be private or public. For-example personal assistants are private agents
and Facebook, amazon, eBay are public agents.
2. Agent could be stationary or mobile also, depending on/from where it operates.
Mobility is required to identify the best resource location to perform it’s roles.
 Agent technologies in detail
2. SOFTWARE AGENT TECHNOLOGIES
Value of Software Agents in a networked World
 major value of employing software agents with intranet, Internet, and extranet
applications is that they are able to assist in locating and filtering data.
 They save time by making decisions about what is relevant to the user thus reducing
the effort required to locate and retrieve data
 They are able to sort through the network and the various databases effortlessly and
with unswerving attention to detail in order to extract the best data.
 They are not limited to hard (quantitative) data; they can also obtain soft data about
new trends that may cause unanticipated changes (and opportunities) in local or even
global markets.
 With an agent at work, the competent user’s decision-making ability is enhanced with
information rather than paralyzed by too much input.
 improve productivity by off-loading a variety of mundane, tedious, and mindless tasks.
 Agent technologies in detail
Motivations / drivers for Software Agent technology
 Mundane personal activity. In a fast-paced society, time-strapped people need new
ways to minimize the time spent on routine personal tasks such as shopping for groceries or
travel planning, so that they can devote more time to professional activities.
 Search and retrieval. It is not possible to directly manipulate a distributed database
system containing millions of data objects. Users will have to relegate the task of searching
and cost comparison to agents. These agents will perform the tedious, time-consuming, and
repetitive tasks of searching databases, retrieving and filtering information, and delivering it
back to the user.
 Repetitive office activity. There is a pressing need to automate tasks performed by
administrative and clerical personnel in functions such as sales or customer support in order
to reduce labour costs and increase office productivity. Today, labour costs are estimated to
be as much as 60 percent of the total cost of information delivery (Abushar and Hirata 2002).
 Decision support. There is a need for increased support for tasks performed by
knowledge workers, especially in the decision-making area. Timely and knowledgeable
decisions made by these professionals greatly increase their effectiveness and the success of
their businesses in the marketplace.
 Domain experts. It is advisable to model costly expertise and make it widely available.
Expert software agents could model real-world agents such as translators, lawyers, diplomats,
union negotiators, stockbrokers, and even clergy.
 Agent technologies in detail
INTELLIGENCE LEVELS;
Definitions of agents are greatly dependent on the agents’ levels of intelligence, which are
described by Lee et al. (1997) as follows:
◗ Level 0 (the lowest). These agents retrieve documents for a user under straight orders.
Popular Web browsers fall into this category. The user must specify the URLs where the
documents are. These agents help in navigating the Web.

◗ Level 1. These agents provide a user-initiated searching facility for finding relevant Web
pages. Internet search agents such as Google, Alta Vista, and Lycos are examples.
Information about pages, titles, and word frequency is stored and indexed. When the user
provides key words, the search engine matches them against the indexed information.
These agents are referred to as search engines.

◗ Level 2. These agents maintain users’ profiles. They then monitor the Internet and notify
the users whenever relevant information is found. An example of such an agent is
WebWatcher. Agents at this level are frequently referred to as semi-intelligent or software
agents.

◗ Level 3. Agents at this level have a learning and deductive component of user profiles to
help a user who cannot formalize a query or specify a target for a search. DiffAgent
(CMU) and Letizia (MIT) are examples of such agents. At this level are referred to as
learning or truly intelligent agents.
 Introduction to agent technologies
CHARACTERISTICS OF SOFTWARE AGENTS
1. autonomy
2. temporal continuity
3. Reactivity
4. goal driven
5. software agent may also possess additional traits such as adaptability, mobility, sociability,
and personality.
1. Autonomy
A software agent senses its environment and acts autonomously upon it. A software agent
can initiate communication, monitor events, and perform tasks without the direct
intervention of humans or others displaying the following characteristics:
◗ Goal-oriented. Accepts high-level requests indicating what a human wants and is
responsible for deciding how and where to satisfy the requests. These are referred to by “
Hess et al. (2000)” as homeostatic goal(s).
◗ Collaborative. Does not blindly obey commands but can modify requests, ask
clarification questions, or even refuse to satisfy certain requests.
◗ Flexible. Actions are not scripted; the agent is able to dynamically choose which actions to
invoke, and in what sequence, in response to the state of its external environment.
◗ Self-starting. Unlike standard programs directly invoked by a user, an agent can sense
changes in its environment and decide when to act.
 Introduction to agent technologies
CHARACTERISTICS OF SOFTWARE AGENTS
2. Temporal continuity - A software agent is a program to which a user assigns a goal or
task. The idea is that once a task or goal has been delegated, it is up to the agent to work
tirelessly in pursuit of that goal. Unlike regular computer programs that terminate when
processing is complete, an agent continues to run—either actively in the foreground or
sleeping in the background—monitoring system events that trigger its actions. You can think
of this attribute as “set and forget.”
3. Reactivity - A software agent responds in a timely fashion to changes in its environment.
This characteristic is crucial for delegation and automation. The general principle on which
software agents operate is “When X happens, do Y,” where X is some system or network
event that the agent continually monitors (Gilbert 1997).
4. GOAL DRIVEN - A software agent does more than simply respond to changes in its
environment. An agent can accept high-level requests specifying the goals of a human user
(or another agent) and decide how and where to satisfy the requests. In some cases, an
agent can modify the goals or establish goals of their own.
5. COMMUNICATION (INTERACTIVITY) -
Many agents are designed to interact with other agents, humans, or software programs.
Instead of making a single agent conduct several tasks, additional agents can be created to
handle un delegated tasks. Thus, communication is necessary. Agents communicate by
following certain communication languages and standards such as ACL and KQML (Bradshaw
1997; Jennings et al. 1998).
 Agent technologies in detail
6. Intelligence and learning
Currently, the majority of agents are not truly intelligent because they cannot learn; only
some agents can learn. This goes beyond mere rule-based reasoning because the agent is
expected to use learning to behave autonomously. Although many in the AI community argue
that few people want agents who learn by “spying” on their users, the ability to learn often
begins with the ability to observe users and predict their behaviour. One of the most common
examples of learning agents is the wizards found in many commercial software programs
(e.g., in Microsoft Office applications). These wizards offer hints to the user, based on
patterns the program detects in the user’s activities.

SIMPLE SOFTWARE AGENTS

 Simple agents work within the context of a single application and focus on a single set of
tasks with a circumscribed set of outcomes.
 These agents automates simple repetitive tasks that could be performed by a person, if
that person had the time, the inclination, or was available to do so. This is
certainly the case with e-mail agents.
E-mail agents sole purpose is to scan incoming and outgoing messages, looking for various
keywords that have been designated by the end user and performing one or more of a
handful of possible operations, such as deleting the message, forwarding the message, or
storing the message within a given folder. For example, an agent at hotmail.com decides
which mail to place in the “junk mail” file. It will also block any mail you ask to be blocked.
 Agent technologies in detail
 e-mail agents have their advantages. They never sleep (unless the application or the
system is shut down), They send you an automatic reply: “Professor Turban is away until July
10.”
They are always available, even when the end user is away from their desk.
They are never bored, and they never miss work. Some executives, managers, and
knowledge workers receive more than 100 to 200 messages a day, and reviewing these
messages can be a tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone task. Automating the review
with an e-mail agent can off-load some of the review process.
The goals of a simple software agent are explicitly specified by an end user.
This is done by either creating a set of “if/then/else” rules or a script that predefines the
actions to be taken by the agent when certain conditions arise. The actions are invoked by
the agent without end-user intervention.
 Agent technologies in detail

In the case of an e-mail agent, the agent simply compares an incoming or outgoing message
against all of the end user’s if/then rules. If a message satisfies the conditions specified in
the “if ” part of the rule, the actions designated in the “then” part are carried out by the
agent. By 2002, popular e-mail programs such as Outlook Express, Eudora, and Netscape
Mail included dozens of agents for e-mail creation and management, such as auto respond,
new mail notification, and spell checking.
 Agent technologies in detail

the rule would read something like, “When the ‘out-of-the-office’ switch is on, if a
message arrives that has the exact words ‘John Smith’ in the ‘From’ field, then
‘Forward’ the message to ‘Sarah Jones.’”
 Agent technologies in detail
LEARNING AGENTS
Software agents are called intelligent agents or learning agents if they have the capacity
to adapt or modify their behaviour; that is, to learn.
Simple software agents, such as e-mail agents, lack this capacity. If a simple software agent
has any intelligence at all, it is found in the subroutines or methods that the agent uses to
do pattern matching. However, these subroutines or methods are built into the
program and cannot be modified by the agent.

As Maes suggests, there are four ways for an interface agent to modify its behaviour:
1. “Look over the shoulder” of the user. An agent can continually monitor the user’s
interactions with the computer. By keeping track of the user’s actions over an extended period
of time, the agent can discern regularities or recurrent patterns and offer to automate these
patterns.
2. Direct and indirect user feedback. The user can provide the agent with negative
feedback either in a direct or indirect fashion. Directly, the user can tell the agent not to
repeat a particular action. Indirectly, the user can neglect the advice offered by an agent and
take a different course of action.
3. Learn from examples given by the user. The user can train the agent by providing it
with hypothetical examples of events and actions that indicate how the agent should behave
in similar situations.
4. Ask the agents of other users. If an agent encounters a situation for which it has no
recommended plan of action, it can ask other agents what actions they would recommend for
that situation.
 Agent technologies in detail
LEARNING AGENTS
 The major difference between the operation of an intelligent learning agent and
the workings of a simple software agent is in how the if/then rules are created.
 With a learning agent, the onus of creating and managing rules rests on the shoulders
of the agent, not the end user.
 Let’s consider Maxim (Maes 1994) intelligent e-mail agent that operates on top of the
Eudora e-mail system that relies on a form of learning known as case-based reasoning.
 Maxim continually monitors what the user does and stores this information as examples.
 The situations are described in terms of fields and keywords in the message (i.e., the
“From,” “To,” and “Cc” lists, the keywords in the “Subject” field, and so on), and the actions
are those performed by the user with respect to the message (e.g., the order in which the
user reads it, whether the user deleted or stored it, and so on).
 When a new situation occurs, the agent analyzes its features based on its stored cases and
suggests an action to the user (such as read, delete, forward, or archive).
The agent measures the confidence, or fit, of a suggested action to a situation.
 Two levels of confidence are used to determine what the agent actually does with
its suggestion; - If the confidence is above the “do-it” threshold, the agent automatically
executes the suggestion. - If the confidence is above the “tell-me” threshold,
the agent will offer a suggestion and wait for input from the user
 Agent technologies in detail

critics argue that most people do not want intelligent agents “looking over their
shoulders” (Greif 1994). They contend that simple software agents that require end
users to fill out forms are easy to use and provide enough utility for the average end
user.
 Agent technologies in detail
MULTI-AGENTS AND COMMUNITIES OF AGENTS
 In executing complex tasks that require much knowledge, it is necessary to employ several
software agents in one application. These agents need to share their knowledge, or the
results of applying this knowledge together may fail.
 An example is routing among telecommunications networks. Information can pass through
a network controlled by one company into another network controlled by another company.
 Computers that control a telecommunications network might find it beneficial to enter into
agreements with other computers that control other networks about routing packets more
efficiently from source to destination.
 Another example is wireless devices that are continuously increasing their functionality.
Wireless devices offer more than Internet access and e-commerce support, they also enable
device-to-device communication. You can take a photograph with your digital camera in one
location and transmit pictures wirelessly, in seconds, to your office. Intelligent agents
embedded in such devices facilitate this interaction.
 Agent technologies in detail
MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS
• In multi-agent systems, there is no single designer who stands behind all the
agents.
• Each agent in the system may be working toward different goals, even contradictory
ones. Agents either compete or cooperate (Decker et al. 1999).
• In a multi-agent system, for example, a customer may want to place a long-distance call.
Once this information is known, agents representing the carriers submit bids simultaneously.
The bids are collected, and the best bid wins.
• In a complex system, the customer’s agent may take the process one step further by
showing all bidders the offers, allowing them to rebid or negotiate.
• A complex task is broken into subtasks, each of which is assigned to an agent that works on
its task independently of others and is supported by a knowledge base.
• Acquiring and interpreting information is done by knowledge-processing agents that use
deductive and inductive methods, as well as computations.
• The data is refined, interpreted, and sent to the coordinator, who transfers to the user
interface whatever is relevant to a specific user’s inquiry or need. If no existing knowledge is
available to answer an inquiry, knowledge creating and collecting agents of various types are
triggered.
 Agent technologies in detail

Important Applications from a Historical Point of View

The earliest applications of software agents can be found in the early 1980’s. The first
publications on agent-related technologies like the contract net protocol [49], or blackboard
systems originate from this time.

The Distributed Vehicle Monitoring Testbed (DVMT) - is one of the first, and at its
time, most influential multi-agent systems. Agents have to monitor and interpret data from
spatially distributed sensors. The overall task of the system was to determine a global picture
of vehicle traffic across the complete sensing area. Every agent is responsible for a certain
part of the complete area.

 The YAMS system - was another influential project using the contract net protocol for
manufacturing control. It was one of the first industrial applications of multi-agent
systems.

 The largest project in Europe was the ARCHON (Architecture for Cooperative
Heterogeneous ON-line systems) project [26] 1989-1993. Practical applications of the
developed architecture and framework were in process control, e.g. the CERN particle
accelerator, or electricity transportation management at Iberdrola. The multi-agent systems
partially consisted of legacy systems which received an agent wrapper that enables interaction
and cooperation capabilities.
 agent technologies explained

Important Applications from a Historical Point of View

 At the beginning of the 90’s, At the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, the OASIS
system (Optimal Aircraft Sequencing using Intelligent Scheduling) was developed
for air traffic control. It has actually been applied in a field study at the airport of Sydney.
When an aircraft enters the airspace of Sydney, an agent is assigned to it. Information and
goals of these agents are set according to the flights goal and the information that the plane
might have. This agent then negotiates with air traffic management agents for landing time
and runaway allocation, or with other agents for conflict free paths.
 Also in the area of personal assistants, the first successes were at the beginning of the
1990’s. Maes presents a set of different agents that support users in mail management, or
Internet news filtering which all build on the related technologies.
 agent technologies explained
Current Applications
 Industrial applications in production planning and scheduling, as well as in real-time control
and supply chain management where software agents can support complex coordination of
the participants
 Another important application is workflow management. The ADEPT project (advanced
decision environment for process tasks) shows how business process management can be
accomplished using negotiating agents
Agent applications in the telecommunication sector have been being developed for more
than ten years. They have provided support for telecommunication services, or service
management, like the ADEPT project. Agent-based routing in telecommunication networks is
mostly associated with simple agents with behaviour inspired by the emergence of ant-trails.
 Health care and knowledge management
 A relatively new application domain is bioinformatics where agent-based systems are
expected to be able to cope with the immense volume of DNA data and the complex tasks
that have to be solved.
 traffic and transportation management
 Air traffic control
 Defence
Shopping agents are ideal applications of Agent Builder agents. These agents can be used
to locate merchandise, compare prices, place orders
 The most favourite area with respect to reactive agents is games and entertainment
industry.
 agent technologies explained
Prospects for Software Agents
In foreseeing the future of information technology, Grover and Segars emphasized four
important trends;
1. hardware is evolving in the direction of smaller and more powerful machines;
2. software is evolving in the direction of user-friendly, modular and flexible platforms;
3. cost of digitizing is approaching zero - Cost of digitizing approaching zero means that
every single piece of information interpreted by our brain through our five senses can be
represented in digital form at no cost.
4. cost of coordinating, which refers to all costs involved in acquiring and evaluating
information, is also approaching zero - The cost of coordinating approaching zero means
that there will be a lot of opportunity for innovation in companies and for securing better
services by customers.
 Trends in artificial intelligence applications - Artificial Intelligence (AI) is concerned with
programs that respond flexibly in situations that were not specifically anticipated by the
programmer. To make computers/programs smarter and smarter and come closer and closer
to imitating, or ultimately surpassing, complex human thought processes, we need to draw
upon advances in artificial intelligence.
 Robotics has always been a branch of AI research and application. Over the years, Robots
have become apparent that in addition to never getting bored, never getting sick and never
going on strike, robots can be designed to work far more rapidly and precisely than humans
alone.
 agent technologies explained
General Issues of Software Agents

 Privacy: how do you ensure your agents maintain your much needed privacy when acting
on your behalf?

 Responsibility which goes with relinquished authority: when you relinquish some of your
responsibility to software agent(s), be aware of the authority that is being transferred to
it/them. How would you like to come back home after a long hard day at work being the
proud owner of a used car negotiated and bought for, courtesy of one of your software
agents? How do you ensure the agent does not run up a huge credit card bill on your behalf?

 Legal issues: following on from the latter, imagine your agent offers some bad advice to
other peer agents resulting in liabilities to other people, who is responsible? The company
who wrote the agent? You who customized it? or Both? We envisage a new raft of legislation
would need to be developed in the future to cover software agents.

Ethical issues: these would also need to be considered. Already, (Norman) is already
concerned enough about the ethics of software agents that he has proposed an agent
etiquette for information service and user agents as they gather information on the WWW. .
 agent technologies explained

CONCLUSION ON SOFTWARE AGENT TECHNOLOGY

Software agents will not be all pervasive. They will not magically solve all the difficult
problems which exist in the current generation of advanced information processing systems
e.g planning in uncertain environments, perceiving and acting in a timely fashion in response
to environmental changes, and inferring a user’s preferences based on their behaviour.
Moreover, by their very nature software agents create a new set of problems which must be
tackled. Because they are autonomous, users may be wary in trusting them to act on their
behalf
 agent technologies explained
3. KAoS AGENT TECHNOLOGY
“ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2814077”
Author – Jeffrey M. Bradshaw
History
KAoS grows out of work beginning in 1988 on a general purpose inter-application
communication mechanism for the Macintosh called MANIAC (Manager for Inter-Application
Communication) (Bradshaw et al. 1991, 1988). Plans for coordination among MANIAC-
enabled applications were modelled and executed by means of an integrated planner
developed using ParcPlace Smalltalk. A later version, NetMANIAC, extended messaging
capabilities to other platforms through the use of TCP/IP. In 1992, a collaboration with the
Seattle University (SU) Software Engineering program to develop the first version of KAoS
(Tockey et al. 1995; George et al. 1994), they replaced the integrated planner with a fully
object-oriented agent framework, borrowing ideas from Shoham’s (1997) AGENT-0 work.
The following year, a new group of students replaced the MANIAC capability with HP
Distributed Smalltalk’s version of OMG’s Common Object RequestBroker Architecture (CORBA)
(Siegel 1996).
 agent technologies explained
3. KAoS AGENT TECHNOLOGY
Motivation
The long-term objective of the KAoS (Knowledgeable Agent-oriented System) agent
architecture is to address two major limitations of current agent technology:

1. Failure to address infrastructure, scalability, and security issues; and

2. lack of semantics and extensibility of agent communication languages.

Suggested solutions;
 The first problem is addressed by taking advantage of the capabilities of commercial
distributed object products (CORBA, DCOM, Java) as a foundation for agent functionality,
and supporting collaborative research and standards-based efforts to resolve agent
interoperability issues.
 The second problem is addressed by providing an open agent communication meta-
architecture in which any number of agent communication languages with their
accompanying semantics could be accommodated. Unlike most agent communication
architectures, KAoS explicitly takes into account not only the individual message, but also
the various sequences of messages in which it may occur. Shared knowledge about
message sequencing conventions (conversation policies) enables agents to coordinate
frequently recurring interactions of a routine nature simply and predictably.
 agent technologies explained
KAoS Architecture
The KAoS architecture currently aims to provide the following:

• A form of agent-oriented programming, based on a foundation of distributed object

technology

• Structured conversations between agents, which may preserve their state over time

• An approach for extending the language of inter-agent communication in a principled

manner, taking into account the repertoire of illocutionary acts (“verbs”) available to agents,
the set of conversation policies available to agents, the content of messages, and a means for
agents to locate and access desired services

• A framework supporting interoperability with other agent implementations as well as with

non-agent programs

• An environment in which to design agents to engage in specialized suites of interactions

 agent technologies explained
The strength of the architecture derives from several sources:
• It is built on a foundation of distributed object technology and is optimized to work with
component integration architectures such as Open-Doc, ActiveX, and Java and with
distributed object services such as those provided by CORBA, DCOM, AND THE INTERNET
• It supports structured conversations that preserve and make use of the context of agent
communication at a higher level than single messages; allow differential handling of messages
depending on the particular conversation policy and the place in the conversation where the
message occurs and permit built-in generic handlers for common negotiation processes
such as countering
• It allows the language of inter-agent communication to be extended in a principled manner,
permitting verbs and conversation policies to be straightforwardly reused, adapted, or
specialized for new situations
• It groups related sets of conversation policies into suites supporting a coherent set services
• It provides facilities for service names (yellow pages), which are advertised to the
Matchmaker by agents offering services
• It provides facilities for agent names (white pages), which allow a Domain Manager to
uniquely identify an agent as long as it persists
• It is appropriate for a wide variety of domains and implementation approaches and is
platform- and language-neutral
• It allows simple agents to be straightforwardly implemented, while providing the requisite
hooks to develop more complex ones
• It supports both procedural and declarative semantics
agent technologies explained
• Each agent has a generic agent
instance, which implements as a minimum
the basic infrastructure for agent
communication. Specific extensions and
capabilities can be added to the basic
structure and protocols through standard
object-oriented mechanisms.
• Mediation agents provide an interface
between a KAoS agent environment and
external non-agent entities, resources, or
agent frameworks.
• Proxy agents extend the scope of the
agent-to-agent protocol beyond
a particular agent domain.
• The Domain Manager carries off
policies set by a human administrator, such
as keeping track of agents that enter and
exit the domain. The Matchmaker can
access information about the location of
the
generic agent instance for any agent that
has advertised its services.
 agent technologies explained
Basic Characteristics of KAoS Agents
 Agent-oriented programming - an agent can be thought of as an extension of the
object-oriented programming approach, where the objects are typically somewhat
autonomous and flexibly goal-directed, respond appropriately to some basic set of speech
acts (e.g., request,
offer, promise), and ideally act in a way that is consistent with certain desirable conventions of
human interaction such as honesty and non-capriciousness. From this perspective, an agent is
essentially “an object with an attitude.”
 Capabilities are the services or functions that an agent can provide as defined in specific
extensions to the generic agent implementation. The Java implementation of KAoS currently
relies on sockets. Because KAoS relies on popular messaging schemes for communication
between extensions and the generic agent, agent capabilities can be defined or extended
straightforwardly using any combination of standard programming languages, general
purpose scripting languages (e.g., AppleScript, Visual Basic, Tcl, Perl, JavaScript) and
declarative logic-based programming languages (e.g., KIF, Prolog).
 Persistent - KAoS agents that are declared as persistent must be able to go into a form of
“suspended animation” (called cryogenic state). Each persistent agent is responsible for
saving the aspects of its structure required allow it to be reactivated when required. The
process of saving and restoring structure may also be simple or complex, depending on the
situation
 agent technologies explained
• Figure 2 shows how each agent goes
Agent Dynamics through the equivalent of birth, life, and
death.
• At birth, agents instantiated and initialized
with some amount of innate structure.
• During their lives, agents go through a
continuous cycle of reading, processing, and
sending messages. Agents may acquire
additional knowledge, desires, and
capabilities as they interact with other
agents and with their environment. As
messages come in, agents update their
structure, formulate their intentions, and
send new messages in order to act on them.
• In specific applications, agent death may
be required to free resources or simply deal
with agents that are no longer useful. Agent
death poses special problems.
Depending on the application, it may be
necessary to include domain specific
procedures for dealing with it. These may
include notification of other agents, transfer
of any pending commitments, or transfer of
knowledge.
 agent technologies explained
Agents and Objects
 Communication between agents takes place through the use of messages.
A message consists of a packet of information, usually sent asynchronously, whose type is
represented by a verb corresponding to some kind of illocutionary act (e.g., request, inform)
 Messages are exchanged by agents in the context of conversations. Each message is part
of an extensible protocol—consisting of both message names and conversation policies—
common to the agents participating in the conversation.
Table 1 enumerates distinctions between communication in classical object-oriented
programming and in the agent-oriented architecture.
 The combination of all these features allows agents to analyze, route, and deliver messages
properly without necessarily requiring interpretation of content until they reach their final
destination.
 agent technologies explained
 Table 2 identifies the characteristics of an operation and compares these to the
characteristics of a message.
 By “operation,” we mean the invocation of a procedure or a method.
 Though operations may take place in isolation, messages occur only in the context
of a conversation.
 agent technologies explained
Applications of KAoS agent technology
 Early versions of KAoS were used to build demonstrations of agent-oriented programming
and simulations of various agent activities. The first prototype implemented a multi-agent
version of a battleship game, defining specializations of the generic agent class for one or
many cooperating ship captains on each team, a game board Matchmaker, an Excel
spreadsheet mediation agent, and a referee (Tockey et al. 1995; Atler et al. 1994).
 A maintenance performance support prototype demonstrated how mediation agents could
help coordinate the interaction between airline maintenance mechanics and their
supervisors and adapt the presentation of task-related information through a dynamic
OpenDoc component interface (Bos et al. 1995). Generic agent capability was specialized to
create a supervisor agent, a job administration agent, a user administration agent, and a
client mediation agent that handled interaction between OpenDoc “clients” and a KAoS agent
domain.
 A scheduling environment prototype showed how KAoS could be used to implement
assistants to aid in the process of scheduling meetings and meeting rooms (Barker
et al. 1995). A simulation of interaction with the agent system through electronic mail and
agent learning of user preferences was also created. The scheduling environment consisted of
a set of scheduling agents, a scenario agent, a mail mediation agent handling interaction
between a MAPI mail application and the agent domain, and an OLE journaling mediation
agent that communicated with Microsoft Excel.
 agent technologies explained
Applications of KAoS agent technology
 Early versions of KAoS were used to build demonstrations of agent-oriented programming
and simulations of various agent activities. The first prototype implemented a multi-agent
version of a battleship game, defining specializations of the generic agent class for one or
many cooperating ship captains on each team, a game board Matchmaker, an Excel
spreadsheet mediation agent, and a referee (Tockey et al. 1995; Atler et al. 1994).
 A maintenance performance support prototype demonstrated how mediation agents could
help coordinate the interaction between airline maintenance mechanics and their
supervisors and adapt the presentation of task-related information through a dynamic
OpenDoc component interface (Bos et al. 1995). Generic agent capability was specialized to
create a supervisor agent, a job administration agent, a user administration agent, and a
client mediation agent that handled interaction between OpenDoc “clients” and a KAoS agent
domain.
 A scheduling environment prototype showed how KAoS could be used to implement
assistants to aid in the process of scheduling meetings and meeting rooms (Barker
et al. 1995). A simulation of interaction with the agent system through electronic mail and
agent learning of user preferences was also created. The scheduling environment consisted of
a set of scheduling agents, a scenario agent, a mail mediation agent handling interaction
between a MAPI mail application and the agent domain, and an OLE journaling mediation
agent that communicated with Microsoft Excel.
 agent technologies explained
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
1) allowing mobile users of small computing devices to interact with a KAoS agent domain
residing on a remote machine
2) integrating the KAoS architecture with mobile agent approaches that permit the physical
migration and secure, managed execution of
agent programs on “guest” hosts not belonging to the sender of the agent.

CONCLUSIONS
The KAoS architecture will succeed to the extent that it allows agents to carry out useful work
while remaining simple to implement. Although it is still far from complete, our experience
with the current KAoS architecture has shown it to be a powerful and flexible basis for diverse
types of agent-oriented systems.
Thank you