Applications of Intelligent Agents
Intelligent agents are a new paradigm for developing software applications. More
than this, agent-based computing has been hailed as ‘the next significant breakthrough in software development’, and ‘the new revolution in software’. Currently, agents are the focus of intense interest on the part of many sub-fields of computer science and artificial intelligence. Agents are being used in an increasingly wide variety of applications, ranging from comparatively small systems such as email filters to large, open, complex, mission critical systems such as air traffic control. At first sight, it may appear that such extremely different types of system can have little in common. And yet this is not the case: in both, the key abstraction used is that of an agent. Our aim in this article is to help the reader to understand why agent technology is seen as a fundamentally important new tool for building such a wide array of systems.