1 Applications of Intelligent Agents

1.1 Introduction Intelligent agents are a new paradigm for developing software applications. More than this, agent-based computing has been hailed as 'the next significant breakthrough in software development' (Sargent, 1992), and 'the new revolution in software' (Ovum, 1994). Currently, agents are the focus of intense interest on the part of many sub-fields of computer science and artificial intelligence. Agents are being used in an increasingly wide variety of applications, ranging from comparatively small systems such as email filters to large, open, complex, mission critical systems such as air traffic control. At first sight, it may appear that such extremely different types of system can have little in common. And yet this is not the case: in both, the key abstraction used is that of an agent. Our aim in this article is to help the reader to understand why agent technology is seen as a fundamentally important new tool for building such a wide array of systems. More precisely, our aims are five-fold: • to introduce the reader to the concept of an agent and agent-based systems, • to help the reader to recognize the domain characteristics that indicate the appropriateness of an agent-based solution, • to introduce the main application areas in which agent technology has been successfully deployed to date, • to identify the main obstacles that lie in the way of the agent system developer, and finally • to provide a guide to the remainder of this book. We begin, in this section, by introducing some basic concepts (such as, perhaps most importantly, the notion of an agent). In Section 1.2, we give some general guidelines on the types of domain for which agent technology is appropriate. In Section 1.3, we survey the key application domains for intelligent agents. In Section 1.4, we discuss some issues in agent system development, and finally, in Section 1.5, we outline the structure of this book. Before we can discuss the development of agent-based systems in detail, we have to describe what we mean by such terms as 'agent' and 'agent-based system'. Unfortunately, we immediately run into difficulties, as some key concepts in agent-based computing lack universally accepted definitions. In particular, there is no real agreement even on the core question of exactly what an agent is (see Franklin and Graesser (1996) for a discussion). However, we believe that most researchers