An Overview of Agent-Oriented Programming

1 have been working in areas related to software agents for a number of years now, together with many students and other colleagues. Recently, terms such as "(intelligent) (software) agents," "knowbots," and "softbots" have become quite popular. The work taking place under this umbrella is di verse, varying in content, style, and quality sufficiently to render terms such as "software agent" meaningless in general. I have spent a fair amount of time in the past two years trying to understand various agent-related work in industry and academia. However, in this chapter I will not attempt to put any order into this area, nor position our own work at Stanford within it. This is the topic of another paper currently in the works. The discussion here will be confined to reviewing our own work on multi-agent systems in general and agent-oriented programming in particular.