CSOM, 12 February 1999
On-line business-to-business sales were $8 billions in 1997 and are expected to reach $327 billions by 2002. (from Forrester Research & Yankee Group 1997)
The percentage of revenue obtained in business to business sales on the Internet is expected to increase from 15% in 1997 to 42% in 2000. (from Hambrecht&Quist survey 1997)
The problem with this definition is that if we define the environment as whatever provides input and receives output, and we consider input to be sensing, and producing output to be acting then every program is an agent.
Intelligent agents are software entities that carry out some set of operations on behalf of a user or another program with some degree of independence or autonomy, and in so doing, employ some knowledge or representation of the user's goals or desires (from IBM).
Major issues:
Example: ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort in which intercommunication
between agents is performed using speech acts. This implements situated
interactions more than ``intelligent'' behavior in isolation.
The MAGNET system includes:
There are two agent roles:
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.
Jeffrey Bradshaw (ed.),
Software Agents, AAAI Press/The MIT Press, 1997.
Jeffrey Rosenschein and Gilad Zlotkin, "Designing Conventions for
Automated Negotiation" AI Magazine, Fall 1994, 29-46.
Yannis Bakos,
"The emerging role of electronic marketplaces on the Internet",
Comm. of the ACM, 41(8):33--42, Special Issue on Information Systems and
Economics, Robert J. Kauffman and Frederick J. Riggins (eds.), August 1998.
Robert H. Guttman, Alexandros G. Moukas, and Pattie Maes.
"Agent-mediated electronic commerce: a survey",
Knowledge Engineering Review, June 1998.
An organized collection of information on agents is at \newline
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agents/
Information on MAGNET and related papers can be found on the Web at
http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/airvl/magnet/
D. A case study: MAGNET
The University of Minnesota's MAGNET (Multi-Agent Negotiation Testbed)
system is a agent-based approach to complex contracting
and supply-chain management problems.
MAGNET is designed to support the execution of complex plans
among a population of independent, autonomous, heterogeneous,
self-interested agents. We call this activity \emph{Plan Execution By
Contracting}.
Plan Execution by Contracting is a way to schedule activities among
multiple self-interested agents.
It is appropriate for domains such as
logistics, dynamic planning and scheduling,
coordination of supply-chain management with production scheduling.
Agents interact through Market Sessions.
Each session is initiated by a single agent for a
particular purpose, and multiple agents may join an existing
session as clients.
A MAGNET agent has four basic functions:
(i) planning,
(ii) negotiation,
(iii) execution monitoring, and
(iv) resource management.
Information on MAGNET and related papers can be found on the Web at
http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/airvl/magnet/
E. Trends and Future Work
Trends
Where to find more information
Special issue of Comm. of ACM, Vol 37, N 7, 1994.