Project Monitoring Intelligent Agent system

A multi-agent system architecture that facilitates the design, implementation and communication of autonomous dedicated agents is discussed. The architecture allows the learning abilities of agents using both connectionist and symbolic artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to be investigated. Identifying a particular supervisor for a student is a very time-consuming task. Processing all the information related to students and staff members, distributing this information, obtaining feedback from the participants, making sure that all students have supervisors and that all members of staff have similar numbers of students to supervise can be a very tedious task. The Project Monitoring Intelligent Agent (PMIA) system has been developed with the aim of automating as much of this process as possible. PMIA is a multi-agent based tool designed using the philosophy of Internet software agents and uses a hybrid architecture that combines the advantages of both symbolic and connectionist approaches to artificial intelligence problem solving. The system design is influenced by the agent architecture proposed by the Knowledge Sharing Effort using the Knowledge, Query and Manipulation Language for agent communication; this is an Internet agent based system, designed using HTML, Perl and Visual C++, that requires a WWW server and the help of Web browsers.