ISA

TABASU M

INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE AGENT

Presented by S.Tabasum Roll. No : 1010179 5th Semester MCA

Introduction:
Definitions:

"An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through effectors. "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.

Categories of agents:

Mobile agents

Interface agents Collaborative agents Information agents Reactive agents Hybrid agents Heterogeneous agents

Attributes

Agent Architectures:
Reactive Agent
Reactive agents have

at most a very simple internal representation of the world, but provide tight coupling of perception and action

Each behaviour continually maps perceptual input to action output Reactive behaviour:

action: S -> A

where S denotes the states of the environment, and A the primitive actions the agent is capable of perform.

Example:

action(s) = Heater off, if temperature OK Heater on, otherwise

Reactive Agent:
Agent
Stimulus-response behaviours E f f e c t o r s

S e n s o r s

State1 State2

Action1 Action2

. . .
Staten

. . .
Actionn

Deliberative Agent:
Explicit symbolic model of the world in which decisions are made via

logical reasoning, based on pattern matching and symbolic manipulation sense-plan-act problem-solving paradigm of classical AI planning systems

Deliberative Agent:

Agent
E f f e c t o r s

S e n s o r s

World Model

Planner

Plan executor

Hybrid Agent:
Combination of deliberative and reactive behaviour.

An agent consists of several subsystems

Subsystems that develop plans and make decisions using symbolic reasoning (deliberative component) Reactive subsystems that are able to react quickly to events without complex reasoning (reactive component)

Hybrid Agent:
Agent
Deliberative component World Model S e n s o r s Planner Plan executor
E f f e c t o r s

observations

modifications

Reactive component
State1 State2 Action1 Action2 Actionn

. . .

. . .

Staten

Environment of Software agents:

Platform:
A place where agents live

not always needed Agent management creation termination security Agent communication services Agent directory services

Example:
Software

Agent Platform Agent Agent Management System Directory Facilitator

Agent Communication Channel

Baseline Protocol

Agent Communication Channel Agent Platform

Agent Communications:
Modelled at higher abstraction level than traditional data

communications.
Speech Act theory

Classic example: President says I declare war is actually an action.

Agent Communications:

Interaction protocols:
Specify agent communication patterns.

Example:
Initiator, Participant FIPA-query-Protocol query, refuse, notunderstood, failure, inform

Initiator

Part icipant

query

ref use

not-under stood

failure

inform

Ontology:
How do communicating agents understand each other? Systems which communicate and work together must share an

ontology.
Ontology

A common vocabulary and agreed upon meanings to describe a subject domain. An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization. An ontology is a description of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents.

Example:

Ontology O1 fruit

apple

lemon

orange

Environments of software agents:

Accessible vs inaccessible

An accessible environment is one in which the agent can obtain complete, accurate, up-to-date information about the environments state. Most moderately complex environments (including, for example, the everyday physical world and the Internet) are inaccessible. Discrete vs continuous

An environment is discrete if there are a fixed, finite number of actions and percepts in it.

 Deterministic vs non-deterministic

A deterministic environment is one in which any action has a single guaranteed effect there is no uncertainty about the state that will result from performing an action. The physical world can to all intents and purposes be regarded as nondeterministic. Static vs dynamic

A static environment is one that can be assumed to remain unchanged except by the performance of actions by the agent. A dynamic environment is one that has other processes operating on it, and which hence changes in ways beyond the agents control. The physical world is a highly dynamic environment.

CONCLUSION:
Intelligent Software agents have been around now since a few years. But

even although this technique is still young, it looks promising already. Promising, but also rather vague and a bit obscure to many. This thesis' aim was - and is - to provide an overview of what agents are offering now and are expected to offer in the future.