What is an Agent? What is a Multi-agent?

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Multi-Agent System (MAS) : A system having numerous autonomous entities, called agents, having collective behaviour to obtain desired functions. Also, termed Distributed Artificial Intelligence, as used in design of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Information Communications Technology as bots and web-crawlers.

Agent (or Software agents) : Defined as autonomous entity that interacts with its environment and other agents on user's behalf. There are variety of agents like Personal (interact directly with user), Collaborative (autonomous and cooperate.), Interface (autonomous and learn) etc.

Agents’ role in MAS is termed Distributed Problem Solving and involves research in areas of coordination, negotiation and communication.

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Number of Multi-agent based software (Open source/commercially) are available, based on Java/ C++ platforms as follows.

• JADE (Jade - Java Agent DEvelopment Framework) & (Telecom Italia - Home Page) - Java Agent DEvelopment Framework By Telecom Italia. An open source written in Java software. It is a distributed, multi-party application with peer-to-peer communication.

• SOAR (Soar : Home) By University of Michigan (Amherst). A general-purpose cognitive architecture for intelligent agents

• EXCALIBUR (http://www.paichai.ac.kr/~habin/rese...t-dev-tool.htm) By Technical University of Berlin (Germany). A generic architecture for autonomous agents for computer game environments. Called ‘Adaptive Constraint-Based Agents in Artificial Environments’.

More can be viewed at the link:
MultiAgent.com: Tools for building MASs

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Did you know this ?
MAS researchers develop communications languages, interaction protocols, and agent architectures that facilitate the development of multiagent systems. For example, a MAS researcher can tell you how to program each ant in a colony in order to get them all to bring food to the nest in the most efficient manner, or how to set up rules so that a group of selfish agents will work together to accomplish a given task. MAS researchers draw on ideas from many disciplines outside of AI, including biology, sociology, economics, organization and management science, complex systems, and philosophy.

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The dynamic nature of E-Commerce requires multi-agent cooperation to be based on dynamic ontology meaning that agent interaction varies in different domains.

eCommerce or eBusiness is the sale and purchase of goods and services on Internet, specially the World Wide Web.
It consists of three parts; customers (buyers who browse for products), sellers (merchants who sell products) and communication channel that connects them.

Thus, above states:
• Routine tasks are being computerised
• Information is enormous, complex, dynamic
• Users require agents to understand, collect information from various sources for decision making.