Agents: Mobility And Communication

Abstract

So far, agent research can be broadly categorized into two areas: intelligent agents and mobile agents. Intelligent agent research has grown from a background of AI, humancomputer interaction, and autonomous systems, while mobile agents research stems from the areas of distributed computing and networked systems. Intelligent agents research addresses intelligent control, planning, domain modeling, user modeling, perception, interagent cooperation, and adaptivity. Intelligent agents can take on many different roles, ranging from representing a human user’s interests to actively collaborating with users and each other. Intelligent agents are being designed to tackle nearly every tedious, non-creative activity that people perform (e.g., Web searches), as well as many more abstract functions (e.g., entertainment). Major issues in intelligent agents research include knowledge representation and communication, architectures for intelligent autonomy, mixed-initiative behavior, collaboration techniques, and learning. Mobile agents address physical communication, agent mobility, tracking and locating mobile agents, security and reliability of agents, etc. Mobile agents are suited for optimizing communication ‐ moving the action towards the source of data ‐ and thereby avoiding the need for huge data transfers. This is beneficial in data-intensive applications such as data mining. Mobility can also improve reliability in certain cases. In the field of electronic commerce, mobile agents naturally reflect the characteristics of buyer and the seller, effectively playing the roles of traveling salesman or broker. They can also be applied for easier software customization, software distribution, and to represent disconnected users. The main issues are in security, providing the infrastructure on the Web (naming, locating, controlling, and messaging) and improving survivability. The biggest challenge for all new agent technology is developing successful applications. For this minitrack, we selected two characteristics of agents that can span the diverging areas of intelligent and mobile agents: mobility and communication. The accepted papers reflect the research issues described in this summary. The minitrack is organized in three sessions. The first session explores the coordination of multiple intelligent agents using dramatically different communication schemes. Andersson and Ygge present an efficient market-based approach to managing very large scale groups of agents engaged in coordination via producer/ consumer transactions. Their CoTree algorithm allows largescale markets to operate efficiently with sparse communication, rapid updates as agent preferences change, and minimal data caching requirements on massively distributed systems. In contrast, Nelson, Penner, and Soken discuss the Interaction Society model of coordination, in which relatively small-scale groups of knowledge-intensive agents collaborate using complex communication about discrete tasking and information requirements. Their model for inter-agent communication and interactions with human users is being applied to build a multi-agent advising system for coordinating military Search and Rescue operations. Finally, Barbuceanu discusses the role of obligations and interdictions in the context of coarse-grain agent interactions. By explicitly capturing social obligations and the costs associated with violating those constraints, he shows how rational agents can achieve coordinated behavior without necessarily sharing goals. The second session addresses Java-based mobile agent systems. The paper by Covaci, Busse and Zhang, describes how a mobile agent system can be used for network management. Their framework is based on existing solutions such as TMN, and can be extended to SNMP.