Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages: A Survey

The concept of an agent has recently become important in Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its relatively youthful subfield, Distributed AI (DAI). Our aim in this paper is to point the reader at what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. For convenience, we divide the area into three themes (though as the reader will see, these divisions are at times somewhat arbitrary). Agent theory is concerned with the question of what an agent is, and the use of mathematical formalisms for representing and reasoning about the properties of agents. Agent architectures can be thought of as software engineering models of agents; researchers in this area are primarily concerned with the problem of constructing software or hardware systems that will satisfy the properties specified by agent theorists. Finally, agent languages are software systems for programming and experimenting with agents; these langua...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: ECAIW
• Authors: Michael Wooldridge, Nicholas R. Jennings
• Keywords: Agent Architectures, Agent Theory, ECAIW 1994, Intelligent Agents, Youthful Subfield