A REVIEW OF RECENT TRENDS IN INTELLIGENT AGENT TECHNOLOGY

Abstract

Intelligent agents originally come from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Programming. The two areas were joined together and became Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) and from this field, the idea of intelligent agents emerged (Stone and Veloso,1997). The idea of an intelligent entity called an agent first appeared in the mid-1950 but nothing happened until the late seventies. The area as we know it appeared in the early stages of the nineties, at the same time as the breakthrough of the Internet (Bragshaw,1997). The similarities between object-orientation and agent technology are striking. This is not strange since they both have emerged from the fields of distributed programming and artificial intelligence (Stone and Veloso,1997). They both try to solve problems with complex situations, but the agent-orientation takes the object-orientation one bit further by giving an agent a goal with its existence. When talking about intelligent agents the researchers do not refer to human intelligence rather artificial intelligence suitable for artifacts such as computers (Petrie,1996)