Agents on the move [mobile software agents]
Morreale, P.
Spectrum, IEEE
Volume 35, Issue 4, Apr 1998 Page(s):34 - 41
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/6.666958
Summary:The author describes a new kind of software, based on artificial
intelligence research, that can move itself from place to place to help
people work more effectively. Known as agents, these artificial
assistants are software components that live inside computer
environments. Developed out of research in artificial intelligence (AI),
agents were made in a variety of forms to perform all sorts of useful
work-including obtaining airline departure dates and times, filtering
e-mail for messages the user considers important, alerting users to
significant stock price changes, and a host of other tasks. At first,
agents were constrained to a single computer or at most to a single
computing environment-a closed, homogenous network of, say, Unix
platforms. Their behavior was limited and all the tasks they could do
had to be pre-established. Today, agents are breaking the bonds that
confine them to a single environment while learning new ways of
accomplishing tasks on their own, based on their experience. The
newcomers are called mobile agents, because they can move from one
computer to another. As they emerge from the shadow of AI research, they
are bringing together telecommunications, software, and
distributed-system technologies to create new ways of getting things
done
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