Dynamic agencies: concepts and applications

In the eld of multiagent systems, belonging to the more general area of Distributed Arti cial Intelligence (DAI), it is important to conceive a multiagent system as an unique machine, called agency. The conception of agency as an unitary machine, which derives from the work of Minsky [8], has the interesting role of focusing some of the critical problems involving the agency machine in general. The purpose of the paper is to illustrate a novel and recent approach to the design of the architecture of an agency, developed by the authors [5, 3, 4, 1] and called dynamic agency. After a brief introduction of the role of agency as an unitary machine and an illustration of the problem tackled by dynamic agencies, we present the architectural characteristic of a dynamic agency and the phases followed in its development. Finally, we shortly illustrate some applications involving dynamic agencies.