Agent-based engineering, the Web, and intelligence

Web based agents show great potential for design and engineering applications. To integrate engineering agents into the Web, researchers must resolve the conflict between HTTP's client server protocol and the peer to peer protocol required by agents. The author surveys the types and definitions of agents, eventually focusing on those useful for engineering, and on how they can be integrated with the World Wide Web. Because it is simply silly to discuss software agents without distinguishing them from other types of software, the author ventures to offer a definition. It will be iconoclastic and perhaps applicable only to a certain type of engineering agent. But it will be useful in identifying some technical implementation issues.