The concept of an agent has become important in both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and mainstream computer science. Our aim in this paper is to point the reader at what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. For convenience, we divide these issues into three areas (though as the reader will see, the divisions are at times somewhat arbitrary). Agent theory is concerned with the question of what an agent is, and the use of mathematical formalisms for representing and reasoning about the properties of agents. Agent architectures can be thought of as software engineering models of agents; researchers in this area are primarily concerned with the problem of designing software or hardware systems that will satisfy the prop-erties specified by agent theorists. Finally, agent languages are software systems for programming and experimenting with agents; these languages may embody principles proposed by theorists. The paper is not intended to serve as a tutorial introduction to all the issues mentioned; we hope instead simply to identify the most important issues, and point to work that elaborates on them. The article includes a short review of current and potential applications of agent technology.

Intentions, an integral part of the mental state of an agent, play an important role in

The study of computational agents capable of rational behaviour has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Theoretical formalizations of such agents and their implementations have proceeded in parallel with little or no connection between them. This paper explores a particular type of rational agent, a BeliefDesire -Intention (BDI) agent. The primary aim of this paper is to integrate (a) the theoretical foundations of BDI agents from both a quantitative decision-theoretic perspective and a symbolic reasoning perspective; (b) the implementations of BDI agents from an ideal theoretical perspective and a more practical perspective; and (c) the building of large-scale applications based on BDI agents. In particular, an air-traffic management application will be described from both a theoretical and an implementation perspective.

The original formulation of SharedPlans (Grosz and Sidner, 1990a) was developed to provide a model of collaborative planning in which it was not necessary for one agent to have intentions-to toward an act of a different agent. Unlike other contemporaneous approaches (Searle, 1990), this formulation provided for two agents to coordinate their activities without introducing any notion of irreducible joint intentions. However, it only treated activities that directly decomposed into single-agent actions, did not address the need for agents to commit to their joint activity, and did not adequately deal with agents having only partial knowledge of the way in which to perform an action. This paper provides a revised and expanded version of SharedPlans that addresses these shortcomings. It also reformulates Pollack's definition of individual plans (Pollack, 1990) to handle cases in which a single agent has only partial knowledge; this reformulation meshes with the definition of Shar...

This paper provides an overview of research and development activities in the field of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. It aims to identify key concepts and applications, and to indicate how they relate to one-another. Some historical context to the field of agent-based computing is given, and contemporary research directions are presented. Finally, a range of open issues and future challenges are highlighted.

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Agent software is a rapidly developing area of research. However, the overuse of the word ‘agent ’ has tended to mask the fact that, in reality, there is a truly heterogeneous body of research being carried out under this banner. This overview paper presents a typology of agents. Next, it places agents in context, defines them and then goes on, inter alia, to overview critically the rationales, hypotheses, goals, challenges and state-of-the-art demonstrators of the various agent types in our typology. Hence, it attempts to make explicit much of what is usually implicit in the agents literature. It also proceeds to overview some other general issues which pertain to all the types of agents in the typology. This paper largely reviews software agents, and it also contains some strong opinions that are not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community. 1 1

The concept of an agent has recently become important in Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its relatively youthful subfield, Distributed AI (DAI). Our aim in this paper is to point the reader at what we perceive to be the most important theoretical and practical issues associated with the design and construction of intelligent agents. For convenience, we divide the area into three themes (though as the reader will see, these divisions are at times somewhat arbitrary). Agent theory is concerned with the question of what an agent is, and the use of mathematical formalisms for representing and reasoning about the properties of agents. Agent architectures can be thought of as software engineering models of agents; researchers in this area are primarily concerned with the problem of constructing software or hardware systems that will satisfy the properties specified by agent theorists. Finally, agent languages are software systems for programming and experimenting with agents; these languages typically embody principles proposed by theorists. The paper is not intended to serve as a tutorial introduction to all the issues mentioned; we hope instead simply to identify the key issues, and point to work that elaborates on them. The paper closes with a detailed bibliography, and some bibliographical remarks. 1

As an alternative to planning, an approach to high-level agent control based on concurrent program execution is considered. The language includes facilities for prioritizing the concurrent execution, interrupting the execution when certain conditions become true, and dealing with exogenous actions. The language di ers from other procedural formalisms for concurrency in that the initial state can be incompletely speci ed and the primitive actions can be user-de ned by axioms in the situation calculus. In a companion paper, a formal de nition in the situation calculus of such a programming language is presented and illustrated with detailed examples. In this paper, the mathematical properties of the programming language are explored. 1

An agent's ability to understand an utterance depends upon its ability to relate that utterance to the preceding discourse. The agent must determine whether the utterance begins a new segment of the discourse, completes the current segment, or contributes to it. The intentional structure of the discourse, comprised of discourse segment purposes and their interrelationships, plays a central role in this process (Grosz and Sidner, 1986). In this thesis, we provide a computational model for recognizing intentional structure and utilizing it in discourse processing. The model specifies how an agent's beliefs about the intentions underlying a discourse affects and are affected by its subsequent discourse. We characterize this process for both interpretation and generation and then provide specific algorithms for modeling the interpretation process. The collaborative planning framework of SharedPlans (Lochbaum, Grosz, and Sidner, 1990; Grosz and Kraus, 1993) provides the basis for our model ...