Exercise 24: Virtual business worlds and cyberagents

Search the Web for a site that uses a cyber character or cyber agent to host a business site. (If you create a successful cyber agent, you may be able to get large companies to use it to sell their products online.)

1. Describe what software agents are.

According to (Wikipedia) , a software agent is a piece of software that acts for a user or other program. Such "action on behalf of" implies the authority to decide which (and if) action is appropriate. The idea is that agents are not strictly invoked for a task, but activate themselves.

2. Differentiate the various types of software agents.

(Wikipedia) identifies the following types of software agents:

• Autonomous agents
Autonomous agents are software agents that claim to be autonomous, being self-contained and capable of making independent decisions, and taking actions to satisfy internal goals based upon their perceived environment.


• Distributed agents
Since agents are well suited to include their required resources in their description, they can be designed to be very loosely coupled and it becomes easy to have them executed as independent threads and on distributed processors. Thus they become distributed agents and the considerations of distributed computing apply. Agent code is particularly easy to implement in a distributed fashion and should scale well


• Multi-agent systems
When several agents (inter)act they may form a multi-agent system a.k.a. multiple-agent system. Characteristically such agents will not have all data or all methods available to achieve an objective (this can be referred to as "limited viewpoint") and thus will have to collaborate with other agents. Also, there may be little or no global control and thus such systems are sometimes referred to as swarm systems. As with distributed agents, data is decentralized and execution is asynchronous


• Mobile agents
Agent code that moves itself, including its execution state, on to another machine, to continue execution there. This is also referred to as mobile code. Agents can be used to gather system information, taking back-up of files by copying them in client-server paradigm, monitoring network throughput or to check resources availability and moderating the resource utilization of system by checking the services running on system


• Fuzzy agents
In computer science a fuzzy agent is a software agent that implements fuzzy logic. This software entity interacts with its environment through an adaptive rule-base and can therefore be considered as a type of intelligent agent.

3. Describe how techniques such as artificial intelligence and statistical techniques are used in software agents.

(Wikipedia)In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is an autonomous entity which observes and acts upon an environment (i.e. it is an agent) and directs its activity towards achieving goals (i.e. it is rational). Intelligent agents may also learn or use knowledge to achieve their goals.

Intelligent agents are also closely related to software agents. For example, autonomous programs used for operator assistance or data mining (sometimes referred to as bots) are also called "intelligent agents".

As software agents have an autonomous role, they need to be able to make decisions. Statistical techniques are used to devise the decision model that the agent will use. As the agent learns, the statistical model is refined by the agent so that the decisions it makes better fit with expectations.

4. List popular software agents currently in use in the commercial world.

• http://www.amazon.com/makes recommendations on what you might like to buy, based upon previous enquiries.
• NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has an agent that monitors inventory, planning, and scheduling equipment ordering to keep costs down.
• Allstate Insurance has a network with thousands of computers. The company uses a network monitoring agent from Computer Associates International called Neugent that watches its huge networks 24 hours a day. Every five seconds, the agent measures 1200 data points and can predict a system crash 45 minutes before it happens.
• Google has agents that analyse web browsing trends and provide targeted advertising.

5. Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.

It is suggested (Wikipedia)that there are 4 essential types of intelligent software agents:

1. Buyer agents or shopping bots
2. User or personal agents
3. Monitoring and surveillance agents
4. Data mining agents

Examples of using software agents include:

• Car insurance Quotes.
• Travel and Holiday comparison portals eg FlightCentre

References
Car insurance Quotes. Free Resources: software agents. Retrieved 14 July 2009, from http://www.autocarinsurancebest.com/search.html?q=software+agents&submit=Search
Wikipedia. Intelligent agent. Retrieved 14 July 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent
Wikipedia. Software agent. Retrieved 14 July 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent