Agent Theory
- PDF / 310,314 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 504.567 x 720 pts Page_size
- 32 Downloads / 183 Views
Agent Theory József Váncza Research Laboratory of Engineering and Management Intelligence, Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
Synonyms Agent systems; Agent-based computing; Autonomous agents; Multi-agent system
Definition Agent theory provides the basis for a novel paradigm of computation. While agent-based computing (or simply, agent system) has several roots as far as its concepts, models, and enabling technologies are concerned, there is a general consensus about its two main abstractions (Wooldridge 2009; Luck et al. 2005; Shoham and LeytonBrown 2009): • An agent is a computational system that is situated in an unpredictable, dynamic environment where it is capable of exhibiting autonomous and intelligent behavior. • An agent’s environment typically includes also other agents with diverging information and/or interests. The community of interacting agents,
as a whole, operates as a multi-agent system (MAS) that can solve such complex problems that are beyond the limits of individual agents.
Theory and Application History The theory of computational agents goes back at least a quarter of a century when research in distributed artificial intelligence had been initiated. Agents made the real breakthrough in the 1990s when the emphasis in mainstream research shifted: the focus on logic was extended and attention changed from goal-seeking to rational behavior, from ideal to resource-bound reasoning, from capturing expertise in narrow domains to reusable and sharable knowledge repositories, and from the single to multiple cognitive entities acting in communities (Russell and Norvig 1995). These developments also coincided with the evolution of network-based computing technology, the Internet, mobile computing, the ubiquity of computing, as well as novel, human-oriented software engineering methodologies (Luck et al. 2005). All these achievements led to what is considered now the agent paradigm of computing. Characterization of Agents An agent operates in an environment from which it is clearly separated (see Fig. 1). Hence, an agent makes observations about its environment, has its
# CIRP 2016 The International Academy for Production Engineering et al. (eds.), CIRP Encyclopedia of Production Engineering, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-35950-7_16702-5
2
own knowledge and beliefs about its environment, has preferences regarding the states of the environment, and, finally, initiates and executes actions to change the environment. Agents operate typically in environments that are only partially known, observable, and predictable. Autonomous agents have the opportunity and ability to make decisions of their own. Rational agents act in the manner most appropriate for the situation at hand and do the best they can do for themselves. Hence, they maximize their expected utility given their own local goals and knowledge. Rationality can be bound by the computational complexity of a decision problem, the limitation of computing resources, or both. An agent with optimization
Data Loading...
