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Intelligent agents
Wooldridge M. (ed), Jennings N. (ed)  Intelligent agents,Amsterdam, The Netherlands,Aug 8-Aug 9, 1994,1994.Type:Whole Proceedings
Date Reviewed: May 1 1996

The metaphor of multiple software processes as interacting agents has attracted widespread attention and taken the field of artificial intelligence by storm. In the marketplace, “agent” has become a buzzword without a well-defined meaning, and those who turn to the research community for answers find the subject so large and rapidly changing that it is difficult to know where to start. This edited collection of papers from a recent European workshop on agent research will help bring order to the discussion.

Proceedings from workshops and conferences are typically inaccessible to outsiders, because each paper takes its own approach and the common threads that bind the community together are not articulated in the printed artifacts. This volume is a welcome exception. The workshop was organized around three themes--theories, architectures, and languages for agents--which guided the invitation of participants, and each paper clearly fits into one of these themes. The editors have provided an extensive introductory paper that reviews each of the research papers, situates it in the broader research literature (with 215 citations), and offers a glossary and an annotated list of systems to which researchers often refer. This introduction is an excellent overview not only of the workshop papers but of current work in the three themes covered by the workshop. At the end of the volume, a five-page integrated index also helps bind the individual contributions together.

The book contains 25 papers:

  • M. Wooldridge and N. R. Jennings, “Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages: A Survey”

  • J. Bell, “Changing Attitudes”

  • C. Castelfranchi, “Guarantees for Autonomy in Cognitive Agent Architectures”

  • A. Cimatti and L. Serafini, “Multi-agent Reasoning with Belief Contexts: The Approach and a Case Study”

  • P. Dongha, “Toward a Formal Model of Commitment for Resource Bounded Agents”

  • B. Dunin-Keplicz and J. Treur, “Compositional Formal Specification of Multi-agent Systems”

  • F. Guichard and J. Ayel, “Logical Reorganization of DAI Systems”

  • M. Soutchanski and E. Ternovaskaia, “Logical Formalization of Concurrent Actions for Multi-agent Systems”

  • G. Staniford and R. Paton, “Simulating Animal Societies with Adaptive Communicating Agents”

  • M. Wooldridge, “This Is My World: The Logic of an Agent-oriented DAI Testbed”

  • J. S. Aitken, F. Schmalhofer, and N. Shadbolt, “A Knowledge Level Characterization of Multi-agent Systems”

  • B. Ekdahl, E. Astor, and P. Davidsson, “Towards Anticipatory Agents”

  • I. A. Ferguson, “Integrated Control and Coordinated Behaviour: A Case for Agent Models”

  • J. Huang, N. R. Jennings, and J. Fox, “An Agent Architecture for Distributed Medical Care”

  • J. Malec, “A Unified Approach to Intelligent Agency”

  • D. Moffat and N. Frijda, “Where There’s a Will There’s an Agent”

  • J. P. Mueller, M. Pischel, and M. Thiel, “Modeling Reactive Behaviour in Vertically Layered Agent Architectures”

  • T. J. Norman and D. Long, “Goal Creation in Motivated Agents”

  • H. D. Burkhard, “Agent-oriented Programming for Open Systems”

  • M. Fisher, “Representing and Executing Agent-based Systems”

  • F. G. McCabe and K. L. Clark, “April--Agent Process Interaction Language”

  • A. Poggi, “DAISY: An Object-oriented System for Distributed Artificial Intelligence”

  • S. R. Thomas, “The PLACA Agent Programming Language”

  • P. Wavish and M. Graham, “Roles, Skills and Behaviour: A Situated Action Approach to Organizing Systems of Interacting Agents”

  • D. Weerasooriya, A. Rao, and K. Ramamohanarao, “Design of a Concurrent Agent-oriented Language”

The first nine research papers fall under the theme of agent theories. Six of the papers (2, 4, 6, 8, 9, and 10) develop a theory as a structure in some formal logic, while two (3 and 7) provide a more philosophical exposition, and one (5) combines the two approaches. Most of the theory papers concentrate on specific aspects or problems of agent-based systems, including specific implementation techniques such as teleological reasoning (2) and belief contexts (4); rigorous definition of metaphors drawn from naturally occurring agent systems such as autonomy (3) and commitment (5); and desired behaviors such as aggregation of individual agents (6 and 7) and concurrency (8).

The next eight papers deal with specific architectures within which agents may be constructed. Two themes dominate these papers. One is that agents should be constructed as a series of layers, each of which adds specific functionality to those below it (papers 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17). Paper 17 includes a particularly helpful review of different ways in which layers can be defined and connected to the environment. The other theme is how an agent can appropriately combine deliberate planning, which is effective but slow, with immediate reaction, which is fast but imprecise (papers 12, 13, 16, and 17). Paper 18 takes this theme a step further, looking at reactivity and planning not as ways to engage the environment, but as ways to define goals, which in turn describe how the agent works with the environment.

The final seven papers discuss programming languages that embody various concepts from both theory and architecture and enable them to be applied to actual implementations. Paper 19 argues philosophically that the community should avoid excessive emphasis on a single language and should instead strive for open systems that can include agents programmed in different languages. The other six papers describe specific languages, either at the level of autonomous active objects upon which agents can be constructed (21 and 22) or in direct support of agent-level reasoning (20, 22, 23, 24, and 25).

As is to be expected in a workshop, the papers in the collection range from blue-sky position papers, through limited implementations in toy domains, to descriptions of fielded systems. The volume includes an integrated index but no integrated bibliography, although the extensive bibliography to the editors’ introduction (including entries through 1994) partially remedies this lack.

Reviewer:  H. Van Dyke Parunak Review #: CR119262 (9605-0336)
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