A retraining methodology for enhancing agent intelligence

Abstract

Data mining has proven a successful gateway for discovering useful knowledge and for enhancing business intelligence in a range of application fields. Incorporating this knowledge into already deployed applications, though, is highly impractical, since it requires reconfigurable software architectures, as well as human expert consulting. In an attempt to overcome this deficiency, we have developed Agent Academy, an integrated development framework that supports both design and control of multi-agent systems (MAS), as well as “agent training”. We define agent training as the automated incorporation of logic structures generated through data mining into the agents of the system. The increased flexibility and cooperation primitives of MAS, augmented with the training and retraining capabilities of Agent Academy, provide a powerful means for the dynamic exploitation of data mining extracted knowledge. In this paper, we present the methodology and tools for agent retraining. Through experimented results with the Agent Academy platform, we demonstrate how the extracted knowledge can be formulated and how retraining can lead to the improvement – in the long run – of agent intelligence.