Intelligent Software Agents: a promising future information technology

摘要

Intelligent software agents are the softwares that act on behalf of the user to find and filter information, negotiate for services, easily automate complex tasks, or collaborate with other software agents to solve complex problems. The term agent is refers to two fundamental concepts. The first is the agent's ability for autonomous execution. The second is the agent's ability to perform domain-oriented reasoning. The central idea underlying software agents is that of delegation. The owner or user of software agent delegates a task to the agent and the agent autonomously performs that task on behalf of the user. This paper describes the concept and communication protocol of intelligent software agents. It examines the characteristics that differentiate the agents from the other software and summarizes the applications of agents to explore the value of agents.