this paper we present the distributed system architecture, agent collaboration interactions, and a reusable set of software components for structuring agents. The system architecture has three types of agents: Interface agents interact with the user receiving user specifications and delivering results. They acquire, model, and utilize user preferences to guide system coordination in support of the user's tasks. Task agents help users perform tasks by formulating problem solving plans and carrying out these plans through querying and exchanging information with other software agents. Information agents

The metaphors of autonomous agents and agent societies havethepotential to make a signi cant impact on the processes of analysis, design, and development of complex software systems on the Internet. In this chapter, we concentrate predominantly on agent societies, and show howwork on coordination models and technologies provides apowerful framework for the engineering of Internet-based, multi-agent systems. First, we introduce the concepts of agent, multi-agent system, and agent-oriented software engineering, and highlight the speci c issues that arise when we take the Internet as the environment thatagents inhabit. We thenprovide a brief survey of the state of the art in the area of agent-oriented methodologies, paying particular attention to the Gaia methodology for agent-oriented analysis and design. Gaia was originally conceived for benevolent agents inhabiting closed systems. However, to broaden its scope, we show how insights from the area of coordination models can be incorporated in order to make it more suitable for developing Internet-based applications.

The Virtual Secretary #ViSe#isa kind of intelligent agent that could assist its user in major secretarial work. Users give the orders of what to do, while agents #gure out how to do and carry out the tasks. This paper presents the ViSe agents in two aspects: #1# to construct individual agent on three intelligence levels: knowledge-base level, learning level and cooperation level; and #2# to model other agents' activities by cooperator-base U task-base for the purpose of e#cient cooperation. We argue that this agent modeling could achieveintelligent cooperation, high performance and easy maintenance in multi-agent systems. Introduction For most people, a common problem is to retrieve the wanted data from many di#erent information sources. Imagine that you are visiting a city for the #rst time and you want to buy a suitable dress for a welcomeparty. Since you are a stranger in this city, you may have to spend a lot of time walking the streets in order to become familiar with...

In response to the problems that have arisen regarding the terminology and concepts of agent-oriented systems, previous work has described a formal framework for understanding agency and autonomy. In this paper we outline the framework and refine it by adding further levels of detail to develop a formal model of the Contract Net Protocol. The model serves to make precise both the operations of nodes in the contract net, and the state of the net at various points during the protocol. In particular, the nature of the dependencies between the nodes in the net is explicated. Finally, we generalise the relationships that can be found in the contract net which are brought out by the formalisation, and introduce more general concepts such as cooperation and engagement.

An intriguing and relatively new metaphor in the programming community is that of an intelligent agent. The idea is to view programs as intelligent agents acting on our behalf. By using the metaphor of intelligent agents the programmer views programs as entities which have a mental state consisting of beliefs and goals. The computational behaviour of an agent is explained in terms of the decisions the agent makes on the basis of its mental state. It is assumed that this way of looking at programs may enhance the design and development of complex computational systems. To support this new style of programming, we propose the agent programming language 3APL. 3APL has a clear and formally dened semantics. The operational semantics of the language is dened by means of transition systems. 3APL is a combination of imperative and logic programming. From imperative programming the language inherits the full range of regular programming constructs, including recursive procedure...

An individual ViSe2 agent has limited knowledge and problem solving capabilities. Cooperation is one efficient way for agents to achieve high level intelligence. To have cooperative behavior, every individual ViSe2 agent maintains a twin-base, which consists of cooperator-base and task-base, for modeling other agents' activities. The cooperation discussed here is in a small agent group. When the scale of a cooperative group becomes larger, we suggest a community/club hierarchy structure for agent organization. The current version of ViSe2 is built to test the validity of cooperation in a small agent group. Implementation results received so far indicate that our model achieve expected efficient cooperation.

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