Software Agents & Their Taxonomy | Ecommerce BBA Handout

Software Agents leacture handouts for eCommerce students of Prime College BBA Stream. This presentation will provide you the short overview of the rapidly evolving area of software agents and their classification with their applications and significance.

1. Software Agents
Intelligent Agents
eCommerce
BBA 6
th
Semester
PRIME COLLEGE
Nayabazar, Kathmandu

2. Motivations
▪Increasingly networked, temporary
connectivity increasing (wireless).
▪Huge interconnection => hassle in finding resource
▪Data overload (e-mail, web pages, fax, …).
▪Greater exchange of digital information.
▪Large volume of data => difficulty in knowledge
extraction and mining
▪Increasingly dependent upon electronic
sources of information.
▪Desire to be ‘better informed’ rather than getting
information manually.
Ecommerce lecture handouts | BBA-Prime College | Hem
Sagar Pokhrel, EC Faculty

3. Tools
Inadequacy of current tools
▪Browsers are user driven, Pull
technology marginally better in
browsers.
▪‘Friendly’ software becoming more
difficult to use (e.g. MS Word!),
assistant required
▪WWW too polluted for casual
browsing, intelligent search techniques
required
Ecommerce lecture handouts | BBA-Prime College | Hem
Sagar Pokhrel, EC Faculty

4. Solution!
Need software solution (agents) that can act on
our behalf:
▪can interact with (say) Internet data sources
▪can process e-mail, voice, fax and other
electronic message sources and push
notifications to us.
▪can communicate with other agents
▪can accurately represent our needs and
preferences in the networked information
environment
▪can negotiate

5. What is
software
agent ?
▪Not easy to get generally agreed definition.
▪Has characteristics: (Can be defined as)
▪Something that acts on behalf of
another
▪Is sociable, capable of meaningful
interaction with other agents (and
humans)
▪Can make decisions on other’s behalf
autonomously
▪Is capable of adapting to changing
environments, learning from user
interaction, co-operation, and mobility.
Ecommerce lecture handouts | BBA-Prime College | Hem
Sagar Pokhrel, EC Faculty

6. Introduction..
A software agent is a persistent,
goal-oriented computer program
that reacts to its environment and
runs without continuous direct
supervision to perform some
function for an end user or another
program. Some, but not all, software
agents haveUIs(user interfaces). A
software agent is the computer
analog of an autonomousrobot.

7. Introduction
“Software agents are defined as being a
software program that can perform
specific tasks for a user and possessing a
degree of intelligence that permits it to
performs parts of its tasks autonomously
and to interact with its environment in a
useful manner.”
-From Intelligent Software Agents Brenner, Zarnekowand Wittig.

8. Technical
Perspective
Agent is a complex
software entity that is
capable of acting with a
certain degree
ofautonomyin order to
accomplish tasks on behalf
of its host.
1
Unlike software objects,
which are defined in terms
ofmethodsandattributes,
an agent is defined in
terms of its behavior.
2
Ecommerce lecture handouts | BBA-Prime
College | Hem Sagar Pokhrel, EC Faculty

9. Significance of agents
What can they do for us and businesses?
▪Conduct targeted Internet searches.
▪Check and prioritize incominge-mail.
▪Test newcomputer games.
▪Fill oute-forms.
▪Conduct online job searches.
▪Synchronizesocial networkingprofiles.
▪Assemble customized news reports.
▪Find good deals ine-commerce.
Ecommerce lecture handouts | BBA-Prime College | Hem
Sagar Pokhrel, EC Faculty

10. Properties of Software Agents
Agent Property Definition
Interaction Communicates with the environment and other agents by means of sensors and
effectors
Adaptation Can adapts/modifies its mental state according to message received from the
environment
Autonomy
Capable of acting without direct external intervention; it has it’s own control thread
and can accept or refuse a request message
Learning
Can learn based on previous experience while reading and interacting with it’s
environment
Mobility Is able to transport itself from one environment in a network to another
Collaboration
Can cooperatewith other agents to achieve it’s goals and the system’s goals
Ecommerce lecture handouts | BBA-Prime College | Hem
Sagar Pokhrel, EC Faculty

11. Taxonomy of
Software
Agents
Types/Categori
es
Ecommerce lecture handouts | BBA-Prime College | Hem
Sagar Pokhrel, EC Faculty
Nwana'sCategory of Software Agent
Nwana'sCategory of Software Agents

12. Collaborative
Learning Agents
or
Learning Agents
▪Improve performance by time
▪The learning element is responsible for
improvements which can make a change
to any of the knowledge components in
the agent itself.
▪Solve many problems in AI
▪Applications
▪Self Driving Car
▪Search Algorithms used in Search
Engines
▪Recognition of Gestures
▪Computer Vision

13. Interface Agents
▪Emphasize autonomy and learning in
order to perform tasks for their owners
▪Support and provide proactive
assistance to a human that is using a
particular application or solving a
certain problem
▪Anticipate user needs
▪Make suggestions
▪Provide advice without explicit user
requests and so on.

14. Interface Agents
▪Limited cooperation with other agents
▪Limited reasoning and planning
capabilities.
▪Kind of “secretary” that helps the user
in their work environment.
▪Interface agent / personal assistant /
personal digital assistant / personal
agent

15. Applications of
Interface Agents
▪Mail management
▪Scheduling meetings
▪News filtering agent
▪Buying/selling on user’s behalf
▪Internet browsing
▪Eg. Digital assistants like Siri, Cortana etc

16. Collaborative
Agents
▪Communication, autonomy, reasoning
▪Emphasize autonomy, as well as
communication and cooperation with
other agents
▪Typically operate in open multi-agent
environments
=> multi-agent systems (MAS)
▪Negotiate with their peers to reach
mutually acceptable agreements during
cooperative problem solving

17. Collaborative
Agents
▪They normally have very limited
learning capabilities
▪Collaborative agents are usually
deliberative agents (e.g. based on the
BDI model), with some reasoning
capabilities
▪BDI => Belief–desire–intention model

18. Applications of
Collaborative Agents
▪Provide solutions to physically
distributed problems
▪air-traffic control, management of a team
of robots
▪Provide solutions to problems with
distributed data sources
▪different offices of a multi-national
business
▪Provide solutions that need
distributed expertise
▪health care provision (family doctors,
nurses, specialists, laboratory analysis, …)

19. Smart Agents
▪Agent that posses all three attributes;
learning, cooperative, and
autonomous.
▪i.e. can learn and cooperate in
autonomous manner
▪Comprise the attributes of
collaborative learning agents, interface
agent as well as collaboration agent.
▪Can be used in diverse fields including
real estate, complex problem solving,
research and also as smart marketing
tool.

20. Static Vs
Dynamic
Agents
Static Agent
▪Doesn’t change or act after perceiving it’s environment
▪If an agent perceives the world at time t
0and the agent
performs no action until t
1, the world will not change.
▪In term of mobility, static agents are generally stagnant in
nature and lack mobility.
▪Agent class other than mobile agent may be static.
Dynamic Agent
▪Changes according to time after perceiving inputs from
environment.
▪In term of mobility, dynamic agents generally travel from
host to host and mobile nature.
▪Mobile agents are example of dynamic agent.

21. Other Types
Hybrid Agents
▪Combination of two or more agent philosophies
within a singular agent.
▪These philosophies may be mobile, interface,
information, collaborative, … etc.
▪The goal is to acquire benefits from
combination of agent philosophies within a
single agent is greater than the gains obtained
from the same agent based on a singular
philosophy.
▪An example of this is collaborative interface
agents

22. Other Types
Heterogeneous
Agents
▪Refersto an integrated set-up of at least
two or more agents which belong to two
or more different agent classes.
▪A heterogeneous agent system may also
contain one or more hybrid agents.
▪A key requirement is in agent based
softwareengineeringwhere
heterogeneous agents play role in
autonomous software maintenance,
upgrade or rewrites.

23. Reactive
Agents
▪Reactive to their environment and external
stimuli.
▪Reactive agents can hardly communicate and
collaborate (only through actions that modify
the common environment)
▪Till now, there is a relatively few number of
reactive software agent-based applications.

24. Information
Agents
▪Software agents that manage the access to
multiple, heterogeneous and geographically
distributed information sources.
▪Information agents are most useful on the
WWW where they can help us with mundane
tasks.
▪For example, we carry out actions that may
consume long time (e.g. searching the Web for
information). Why does not the computer (e.g.
an information agent) carries out such tasks for
us and later on present us with the results?

25. Mobile Agents
▪Able to migrate from host to host to work in a
heterogeneous network environment.
▪Note that not only an agent transports itself,
but also its state.
▪When it reaches the new host, the agent should
be able to perform appropriately in the new
environment.

26. Search Agents
▪Asearch agent(orsearch bot) is asoftware
programorbotthatsearchesonlineforgoo
dsorservicesthat meet certain criteria set
by theuser.
▪Based on searching algorithms like genetic
algorithms which can learn and update
knowledge regularly.

27. References
URL1: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/theo-5/www/pleiades.html.
URL2: http://www.sce.carleton.ca/netmanage/docs/AgentsOverview/ao.html
Wooldridge, M. & Jennings, N. (eds.) (1995b),Intelligent Agents, Lecture Notes in Artificial
Intelligence890, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag.
Amstrong, R., Freitag, D., Jopachims, T. & Mitchell, T. (1995), "Webwatcher: A Learning Apprentice
for the World Wide Web", AAAI Press.
Agre, P. E. (1988),The Dynamic Structure of Everyday Life, Ph.DThesis, Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science, MIT.
Ecommerce lecture handouts | BBA-Prime College | Hem
Sagar Pokhrel, EC Faculty

28. Thank You !