Designing Behaviors for Information Agents
Abstract
To facilitate the rapid development and open system interoperability of autonomous agents we need to carefully specify and effectively implement various classes of agent behaviors. Our current focus is on the behaviors and underlying architecture of WWW-based autonomous software agents that collect and supply information to humans and other computational agents. This paper discusses a set of architectural building blocks that support the specification of behaviors for these information agents in a way that allows periodic actions, interleaving of planning and execution, and the concurrent activation of multiple behaviors with asynchronous components. We present an initial set of information agent behaviors, including responding to repetitive queries, monitoring information sources, advertising capabilities, and self cloning. We have implemented and tested these behaviors on the WWW in the context of WARREN, an open multi-agent organization for financial portfolio management.
BibTeX
@conference{Sycara-1997-14307,author = {Katia Sycara and K. Decker and Anandeep S. Pannu and M. Williamson},
title = {Designing Behaviors for Information Agents},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 1st International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AGENTS '97)},
year = {1997},
month = {February},
pages = {404 - 412},
keywords = {agent architectures, adaptation to run-time events, multi-agent communication},
}