Intelligent Agent Technology

Abstract

This chapter describes and discusses the types of agents in use or under research and the technologies that are being developed to support the use of agents. The origins of intelligent agents come primarily from artificial intelligence research work done in the 1970s and 1980s in areas such as planning, robotics, knowledge-based systems, and learning techniques. Business process automation is proving to be a profitable focus for agent technology. Intelligent agent systems are being developed to use the many available financial information resources on the Internet to monitor and manage a user’s financial portfolio taking into account such factors as uncertainty, timeliness of data, deadlines, etc. Technologies and research areas supporting agent applications include agent communication languages, mobile and autonomous agent technologies, and work in cooperation and coordination and in learning. The primary types of agents currently deployed include Internet agents, electronic commerce agents, business application agents, interface agents, and data mining agents.