Desktop Agent Manager (DAM): Decision Mechanism

Desktop software agents are background processes that notify a computer user of certain predefined events. The complexity of desktop computing is increasing due to the proliferation of software agents. A desktop agent manager (DAM) may become an important component of desktop computing. This article focuses on the decision mechanism for the DAM to decide which agents should be allowed to access the user, which agents' results should be stored for future review by the user, and which of the agents should be filtered out. We prove the validity of the concept of a DAM by developing an architecture that includes both a prototypeof the DAM and a simulator of various types of agents. In this article, we present the results of our simulations and analyses of the DAM decision mechanism.