Using Agent Technology for Company Knowledge Management

Emerging agent-based systems offer a new means of effectively managing knowledge to address complex decision processes, thereby enabling solutions to many real problems that have heretofore appeared intractable. This article presents an overview of expert system and agent technologies, and shows the latter as a powerful extension of artificial intelligence for systems development. To illustrate, a system developed first using an expert system approach and then an agent-based approach is used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the agent-based approach. Last, the practical implications of a company adoption of agent-based technology for systems development are addressed.