Software Agent

Negotiation, an important facet of business, is an iterative and complex process. Depending on the nature of business and the type of transaction, negotiation criteria, duration and complexity vary widely. An intelligent software agent can help the consumers and enterprises in business negotiation. It can negotiate with humans or with other software agents to arrive at mutually agreeable terms and

The use of software agents as Database Management System components lead to database systems that may be conflgured and extended to support new requirements. We focus here with the self-tuning feature, which demands a somewhat intelligent behavior that agents could add to traditional DBMS modules. We propose in this paper an agent-based database architecture to deal with automatic index creation.

We describe Syskill & Webert, a software agent that learnsto rate pages on the World Wide Web (WWW), decidingwhat pages might interest a user. The user rates exploredpages on a three point scale, and Syskill & Webert learnsa user profile by analyzing the information on each page.The user profile can be used in two ways. First, it can beused to

In the present competitive scenario Supply Chain Management (SCM) is a challenging problem which demands appropriate strategy to efficiently handle the dynamic requirements of customers. One of the key issues in managing supply chain activities is to monitor workflows across organizational boundaries so that the stakeholders operate in a concerted manner in order to achieve the goal. Integrating various processes in SCM is mainly based on information sharing and redeployment between various associated activities. In this paper we propose a Service oriented Inter-organizational Workflow (IOW) model augmented with software agents to manage the collaboration among several autonomous and heterogeneous business processes distributed over different enterprises. Considering the dynamic nature of SCM, software agents have been employed for composition and enactment of cross-organizational services.

Algorithmic trading and artificial stock markets have generated huge interest not only among brokers and traders in the financial markets but also across various disciplines in the academia. The emergence of algorithmic trading has created a new environment where the classic way of trading requires new approaches. In order to understand the impact of such a trading process on the

Abstract We consider automated negotiation as a process carried out by software agents to reach a consensus. To automate negotiation, we expect agents to understand their user's preferences, generate offers that will satisfy their user, and decide whether counter offers are satisfactory. For this purpose, a crucial aspect is the treatment of preferences. An agent not only needs to understand its own user's preferences, but also its opponent's preferences so that agreements can be reached. Accordingly, this paper proposes a learning algorithm ...

Our research agenda focuses on building software agents that can employ user modeling techniques to facilitate information access and management tasks. Personal assistant agents embody a clearly beneficial application of intelligent agent technology. A particular kind of assistant agents, recommender systems, can be used to recommend items of interest to users. To be successful, such systems should be able to

Algorithmic trading and artificial stock markets have generated huge interest not only among brokers and traders in the financial markets but also across various disciplines in the academia. The emergence of algorithmic trading has created a new environment where the classic way of trading requires new approaches. In order to understand the impact of such a trading process on the functioning of the market, new tools, theories and approaches need to be created. Thus artificial stock markets have emerged as simulation environments to test, understand and model the impact of algorithmic trading, where humans and software agents may compete on the same market. The purpose of this paper is to create a framework to test and analyse various trading strategies in a dedicated artificial environment.1

... into seven types: collaborative, interface, mobile, information/Internet, reactive, hybrid, and smart ... simultaneously in different departments: 1. In the inventory management department, coordination ... Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents. ...

With negotiation being an often difficult process involving complex problems, computerbased support has been employed in its various phases and tasks. This chapter provides a historical overview of software used to support negotiations, aid negotiators, and automate one or more negotiation activities. First, it presents several system classifications, architectures and configurations. Then, it focuses on negotiation support systems (NSSs) and related systems introduced in the early 1980s, and on e-negotiation systems (ENSs), which are deployed on the web. These broad categories are discussed from four perspectives: reallife applications, systems used in research and training, research results, and research frameworks.

With negotiation being an often difficult process involving complex problems, computer-based support has been employed in its various phases and tasks. This article provides a historical overview of software used to support negotiations, aid negotiators, and automate one or more negotiation activities. First, it presents several system classifications, including implemented models, system architectures, and configurations of various systems interacting with human negotiators. Then, it focuses on NSSs (negotiation support systems) and related systems introduced in the early 1980s and on ENSs (e-negotiation systems), which are deployed on the web. These broad categories are discussed from four perspectives: real-life applications, systems used in research and training, research results, and research frameworks.

In an attempt to illustrate the application of cognitive science principles to hard AI problems in machine learning we propose the LIDA technology, a cognitive science based architecture capable of more human-like learning. A LIDA based software agent or cognitive robot will be capable of three fundamental, continuously active, humanlike learning mechanisms: 1) perceptual learning, the learning of new objects, categories, relations, etc., 2) episodic learning of events, the what, where, and when, 3) procedural learning, the ...

This paper explores the challenges of constructing an architecture for inter-organisational collaborative interactions based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web services choreographies and software agents. We present an approach to harmonisation of the “global” or neutral definition of business collaborations, with partner-specific implementations, which can differ in terms of platform, environment, implementation technology, etc. By introducing the concept of pluggable business service handlers into our architecture we draw on the work carried out by ebXML initiative, business services interfaces, in particular. Due to increasing need for better management of collaborative interactions, Virtual Organisations (VO) become an important tool for creation and maintenance of federated trust domains among the collaboration partners. We look into the software agents abilities to serve as the background support mechanism for the automation and management of the Virtual Organisations...

Application development on handheld devices using software agent technology is becoming more and more popular around the world. Escalation in the use of lightweight devices and PDA’s leads us to create a concrete base for future nomadic applications, positioned in a changing environment. However, constrained characteristics of handheld devices serve as the main hindrance towards achieving this goal. This paper presents the architecture of context aware FIPA complaint multi agent system for the lightweight devices called SAGE-Lite, which are capable of providing fault tolerance through the mechanism of object persistence. Agents existing on lightweight devices can communicate and provide services via Bluetooth and the communication with the server is done via WAP. Since agents communicate via sending and receiving ACL messages, this architecture will minimize communication latency with in the platform. This framework allows implementing agent-based applications like business applications or e-commerce applications on these resource-constrained devices.

Fault diagnosis and prognosis are important tools for the reliability, availability and survivability of navy all-electric ships. Extending the fault detection and diagnosis into predictive maintenance increases the value of this technology. The traditional diagnosis can be viewed as a single diagnostic agent having a model of the whole system to be diagnosed. This becomes inadequate when the system becomes large and distributed as on the electric ships. For such systems, the software multi-agents may offer a solution. This paper first presents a brief review on the traditional fault diagnosis method with an emphasis on its application to electric motors as important components on the all-electric ship. The software agent technology is then introduced. The discussion is made about how this technology supports the drastic manning reduction requirements for the future navy ships. Examples are given on the existing naval applications of diagnostic and prognostic software agents.