Software Agents: A review

Abstract

[Introduction] In September 1996, Broadcom Ireland formed a research collaboration with the Computer Science Department in Trinity College Dublin., in order to explore current research in the domain of Intelligent Agents and to apply this technology to applications in communications. The resulting collaboration has been named the Intelligent Agents Group (IAG), consisting of four members from TCD working in liaison with a group of similar size from Broadcom. Intelligent Agents are one of the "hot" topics in Information Systems R&D at the moment. The last ten years have seen a marked interest in agent-oriented technology, spanning applications as diverse as information retrieval, user interface design and network management. This diversity means that the IA field presents a very confusing picture. The main goal of this IAG review is to report on research in the rapidly evolving area of software agents and to highlight the applicability of this technology to our sponsor?s interests. Chapter 2 introduces the concept of an agent, the reasons for the increasingly growing interest in this field and briefly outlines the key aspects of the three areas the IAG has chosen for research, namely, Intelligent User Interfaces, Distributed Agent Technology and Mobile Agent Technology. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 will then provide in-depth overviews on each of these areas, outlining the underlying technologies and associated research projects and existing applications. Finally, section 6 will conclude this review with an overall summary. More information is available from our WWW pages at: http://www.cs.tcd.ie/Brenda.Nangle/iag.html