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Future Enterprise - Collaborative Intelligent Agents
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| Written by David Hunter Tow |
Agents in the form of small intelligent autonomous programs are playing an increasing role in managing business services and processes.
When agents interact with each other cooperatively they form a collaborative multiagent system, which greatly enhances their level of operational efficiency and problem solving capability. Multiagent systems can exhibit a high level of intelligence and will be increasingly applied to critical decision support functions in business, economics and science.
At a personal level, agent programs also learn user’s interests, preferences and habits and provide proactive personalised assistance to enhance collaboration and productivity- analogous to personal assistants in the real world. They are already routinely applied in a wide range of complex operations including- marketplace trading, financial management, communications, social networks, scientific computing, manufacturing and power distribution.
Collaborating agents are able to gather knowledge from a diverse set of databases and semi-structured text repositories across the internet. For example broker agents process requests against a domain ontology by finding other agents that can satisfy the required knowledge. Resource agents then can be recruited to support the linkage required between the user queries and the information resources.
An ideal agent should not only know its goal and try to achieve it. As with human agents it must also be adaptive- capable of learning from experience and responding to foreseen and unforeseen circumstances with a repertoire of knowledge and problem solving techniques. It should also be relatively autonomous by sensing the current state of its knowledge environment and act independently to make progress towards its goal.
Future Trends
As agent technology moves into the marketplace there is increasing interest in techniques for modelling multiagent collaborative systems and methodologies for constructing them. The most promising approach to designing such agents employs artificial intelligence techniques based on artificial life research, in which virtual organisms are programmed to adapt autonomously in response to their changing environmental demands using evolutionary principles.
Over time, artificial evolution will codify and combine the behaviours of the most effective agents to evolve fitter poulations, with each succeeding population better adapted to serve the user's interests and goals. Such agent ecosystems will continually renew themselves as their environment changes, eventually having an enormous social, economic and political impact.
Agents are already playing an increasingly important role in enterprise applications such as e-commerce, marketing, scientific computing, intelligent manufacturing, home automation, component-based software construction and power distribution management.
They will increasingly form the basis for the autonomous management of the future enterprise.
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