Now professional software developers working in highly complex distributed environments can learn how to create agents for client/server environments. This book clearly explains the programming of agents for improving user interfaces, for improving performance and usability of LANS and WANS, for managing mail, and even for assisting in the development of other software.

"This book is a catalyst for emerging research in intelligent information, specifically artificial intelligent technologies and applications to assist in improving productivity in many roles such as assistants to human operators and autonomous decision-making components of complex systems"--Provided by publisher.

Designing Distributed Learning Environments with Intelligent Software Agents reports on the most recent advances in agent technologies for distributed learning. Chapters are devoted to the various aspects of intelligent software agents in distributed learning, including the methodological and technical issues on where and how intelligent agents can contribute to meeting distributed learning needs today and tomorrow. This book benefits the AI (artificial intelligence) and educational communities in their research and development, offering new and interesting research issues surrounding the development of distributed learning environments in the Semantic Web age. In addition, the ideas presented in the book are applicable to other domains such as Agent-Supported Web Services, distributed business process and resource integration, computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) and e-Commerce.

Distributed Intelligent Systems: A Coordination Perspective comprehensively answers commonly asked questions about coordination in agent-oriented distributed systems. Characterizing the state-of-the-art research in the field of coordination with regard to the development of distributed agent-oriented systems is a particularly complex endeavour; while existing books deal with specific aspects of coordination, the major contribution of this book lies in the attempt to provide an in-depth review covering a wide range of issues regarding multi-agent coordination in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Key features: Unveils the lack of coherence and order that characterizes the area of research pertaining to coordination of distributed intelligent systems Examines coordination models, frameworks, strategies and techniques to enable the development of distributed intelligent agent-oriented systems Provides specific recommendations to realize more widespread deployment of agent-based systems

Building Intelligent Agents is unique in its comprehensive coverage of the subject. The first part of the book presents an original theory for building intelligent agents and a methodology and tool that implement the theory. The second part of the book presents complex and detailed case studies of building different types of agents: an educational assessment agent, a statistical analysis assessment and support agent, an engineering design assistant, and a virtual military commander. Also featured in this book is Disciple, a toolkit for building interactive agents which function in much the same way as a human apprentice. Disciple-based agents can reason both with incomplete information, but also with information that is potentially incorrect. This approach, in which the agent learns its behavior from its teacher, integrates many machine learning and knowledge acquisition techniques, taking advantage of their complementary strengths to compensate for each others weakness. As a consequence, it significantly reduces (or even eliminates) the involvement of a knowledge engineer in the process of building an intelligent agent.

Build your own intelligent agent system... Intelligent agent technology is a tool of modern computer science that can be used to engineer complex computer programmes that behave rationally in dynamic and changing environments. Applications range from small programmes that intelligently search the Web buying and selling goods via electronic commerce, to autonomous space probes. This powerful technology is not widely used, however, as developing intelligent agent software requires high levels of training and skill. The authors of this book have developed and tested a methodology and tools for developing intelligent agent systems. With this methodology (Prometheus) developers can start agent-oriented designs and implementations easily from scratch saving valuable time and resources. Developing Intelligent Agent Systems not only answers the questions “what are agents?” and “why are they useful?” but also the crucial question: “how do I design and build intelligent agent systems?” The book covers everything a practitioner needs to know to begin to effectively use this technology - including an introduction to the notion of agents, a description of the concepts involved, and a software engineering methodology. Read on for: a practical step-by-step introduction to designing and building intelligent agent systems. a full life-cycle methodology for developing intelligent agent systems covering specification, analysis, design and implementation of agents. PDT: Prometheus Design Tool – software support for the Prometheus design process. the example of an electronic bookstore to illustrate the design process throughout the book. Electronic resources including the Prometheus Design Tool (PDT), can be found at: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/agents/prometheus This book is aimed at industrial software developers, software engineers and at advanced undergraduate students. It assumes knowledge of basic software engineering but does not require knowledge of Artificial Intelligence or of mathematics. Familiarity with Java will help in reading the examples in chapter 10.

This volume is comprised of the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Information Systems Development held August 26th-28th, 2004, at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilnius, Lithuania. The aim of this volume is to provide a forum for the research and practices addressing current issues associated with Information Systems Development (ISD). Every day, new technologies, applications, and methods raise the standards for the quality of systems expected by organizations as well as end users. All are becoming dependent on systems reliability, scalability, and performance. Thus, it is crucial to exchange ideas and experiences, and to stimulate exploration of new solutions. This proceedings provides a forum for both technical and organizational issues.

Most artificial intelligence research investigates intelligent behavior for a single agent--solving problems heuristically, understanding natural language, and so on. Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is concerned with coordinated intelligent behavior: intelligent agents coordinating their knowledge, skills, and plans to act or solve problems, working toward a single goal, or toward separate, individual goals that interact. DAI provides intellectual insights about organization, interaction, and problem solving among intelligent agents. This comprehensive collection of articles shows the breadth and depth of DAI research. The selected information is relevant to emerging DAI technologies as well as to practical problems in artificial intelligence, distributed computing systems, and human-computer interaction. "Readings in Distributed Artificial Intelligence" proposes a framework for understanding the problems and possibilities of DAI. It divides the study into three realms: the natural systems approach (emulating strategies and representations people use to coordinate their activities), the engineering/science perspective (building automated, coordinated problem solvers for specific applications), and a third, hybrid approach that is useful in analyzing and developing mixed collections of machines and human agents working together. The editors introduce the volume with an important survey of the motivations, research, and results of work in DAI. This historical and conceptual overview combines with chapter introductions to guide the reader through this fascinating field. A unique and extensive bibliography is also provided.

The first book to provide an integrative presentation of the issues, challenges and success of designing, building and using agent applications. The chapters presented are written by internationally leading authorities in the field, with a general audience in mind. The result is a unique overview of agent technology applications, ranging from an introduction to the technical foundations to reports on dealing with specific agent systems in practice.

Learn how to employ JADE to build multi-agent systems! JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment framework) is a middleware for the development of applications, both in the mobile and fixed environment, based on the Peer-to-Peer intelligent autonomous agent approach. JADE enables developers to implement and deploy multi-agent systems, including agents running on wireless networks and limited-resource devices. Developing Multi-Agent Systems with JADE is a practical guide to using JADE. The text will give an introduction to agent technologies and the JADE Platform, before proceeding to give a comprehensive guide to programming with JADE. Basic features such as creating agents, agent tasks, agent communication, agent discovery and GUIs are covered, as well as more advanced features including ontologies and content languages, complex behaviours, interaction protocols, agent mobility, and the in-process interface. Issues such as JADE internals, running JADE agents on mobile devices, deploying a fault tolerant JADE platform, and main add-ons are also covered in depth. Developing Multi-Agent Systems with JADE: Comprehensive guide to using JADE to build multi-agent systems and agent orientated programming. Describes and explains ontologies and content language, interaction protocols and complex behaviour. Includes material on persistence, security and a semantics framework. Contains numerous examples, problems, and illustrations to enhance learning. Presents a case study demonstrating the use of JADE in practice. Offers an accompanying website with additional learning resources such as sample code, exercises and PPT-slides. This invaluable resource will provide multi-agent systems practitioners, programmers working in the software industry with an interest on multi-agent systems as well as final year undergraduate and postgraduate students in CS and advanced networking and telecoms courses with a comprehensive guide to using JADE to employ multi agent systems. With contributions from experts in JADE and multi agent technology.