3 Types

Question 1

7 agent types

Answer 1

• Collaborative Agents
• Interface Agents
• Mobile Agents
• Internet / Information agents
• Reactive agents
• Hybrid agents
• Heterogeneous systems

Question 2

collaborative agents

Answer 2

Collaborative agents are usually deliberative agents (e.g. based on the BDI model), with some reasoning capabilities. They normally have very limited learning capabilities and negotiate with their peers to reach mutually acceptable agreements during cooperative problem solving.

-> solve problems that are too large for a single centralised agent or that are inherently distributed

Question 3

collaborative agents

applications

Answer 3

• Provide solutions to physically distributed problems
  air-traffic control, management of a team of robots
• Provide solutions to problems with distributed data sources
  different offices of a multi-national business
• Provide solutions that need distributed expertise
  health care provision (family doctors, nurses, specialists, laboratory analysis…

Question 4

interface agents

Answer 4

Autonomy and learning in order to perform tasks for their owners. Support and provide proactive assistance to a human. Anticipate user needs, make suggestions, provide advide without explicit user request

• limited cooperation with other agents
• limited reasoning and planning capabilities

-> personal assistant

• automation of routine activities
• learn and adapt

Question 5

interface agents

applications

Answer 5

Personal assistant
Mail management
Scheduling meetings
Internet browsing
News filtering agent
Buying/selling on behalf of the user
Negotiate a meeting time with other agents

Question 6

information agents

Answer 6

Information agents = Internet agents
Main task: proactive acquisition, mediation and maintenance of relevant information for a user/other agents, manage the access to multiple, heterogeneous and geographically distributed information sources.

• information retrieval
• information synthesis and presentation
• learn and adapt to user preferences

Question 7

information agents

applications

Answer 7

web search engines (crawl, process, compute popularity, build index, store information)

information agents (learn and adapt to user preferences)

Question 8

heterogeneous systems

Answer 8

Homogeneous system: all agents belong to the same type. Agentification of existing applications.

Architectures:

• flat (any agent can talk to any)
• federated system (special agents manage the connections)