Intelligent Software Agents with Applications in Focus

Most people are familiar with the concept of agents in real life. There are stock-market agents, sports agents, real-estate agents, etc. Agents are used to filter and present information to consumers. Likewise, during the last couple of decades, people have developed software agents, that have the similar role. They behave intelligently, run on computers, and are autonomous, but are not human beings. Basically, an agent is a computer program that is capable of performing a flexible and independent action in typically dynamic and unpredictable domains (Luck, McBurney, Shehory, & Willmott, 2005). Agents are capable of performing actions and making decisions without the guidance of a human. Software agents emerged in the IT because of the ever-growing need for information processing, and the problems concerning dealing and working with large quantities of data. Especially important is how agents act with other agents in the same environment, and the connections they form to find, refine and present the information in a best way. Agents certainly can do tasks better if they perform together, and that is why the multi-agent systems were developed. The concept of an agent has become important in a diverse range of sub-disciplines of IT, including software engineering, networking, mobile systems, control systems, decision support, information recovery and management, e-commerce, and many others. Agents are now used in an increasingly wide number of applications — ranging from comparatively small systems such as web or e-mail filters to large, complex systems such as air-traffic control, that have a large dependency on fast and precise decision making. Undoubtedly, the main contribution to the field of intelligent software agents came from the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The main focus of AI is to build intelligent entities and if these entities sense and act in some environment, then they can be considered agents (Russell & Norvig, 1995). Also, object-oriented programming (Booch, 2004), concurrent object-based systems (Agha, Wegner, and Yonezawa, 1993), and human-computer interaction (Maes, 1994) are fields that constantly drive forward the development of agents.