Software Agents
The key concept used in DPS and MABS is the abstraction called software agents. An agent is a virtual (or physical) autonomous entity that has an understanding of its environment and acts upon it. An agent is usually able to communicate with other agents in the same system to achieve a common goal, that one agent alone could not achieve. This communicate system uses an agent communication language.
A first classification that is useful is to divide agents into:
- reactive agent – A reactive agent is not much more than an automaton that receives input, processes it and produces an output.
- deliberative agent – A deliberative agent in contrast should have an internal view of its environment and is able to follow its own plans.
- hybrid agent – A hybrid agent is a mixture of reactive and deliberative, that follows its own plans, but also sometimes directly reacts to external events without deliberation.
Well-recognized agent architectures that describe how an agent is internally structured are:
- Soar (a rule-based approach)
- BDI (Believe Desire Intention, a general architecture that describes how plans are made)
- InterRAP (A three-layer architecture, with a reactive, a deliberative and a social layer)
- PECS (Physics, Emotion, Cognition, Social, describes how those four parts influences the agents behavior).
Read more about this topic: Distributed Artificial Intelligence
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“The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)