1. Differentiate the various types of software agents.
Intelligent software agents
The design of intelligent software agents is a branch of artificial intelligence research. Capabilities of intelligent agents include ability to adapt the environment and reconfiguring in response. This can be achieved through the choice of alternative problem-solving-rules or algorithms, or through the discovery of problem solving strategies. Adaptation may also include other aspects of an agent’s internal construction, such as recruiting processor or storage resources.
It also has the ability to learn through trial-and-error, it implies a capability of introspection and analysis of behavior and success.
Distributed agents
Since agents are well suited to include their required resources in their description, they can be designed to be very loosely coupled and it becomes easy to have them executed as independent threads and on distributed processors. Thus they become distributed agents and the considerations of distributed computing apply. Agent code is particularly easy to implement in a distributed fashion and should scale well.
Mobile agents
With mobile agent, the agent code moves by itself, including its execution state, on to another machine, to continue execution there. Agents can be used to gather system information, taking back-up of files by copying them in client-server paradigm, monitoring network throughput or to check resources availability and moderating the resource utilization of system by checking the services running on system.
Multi-agent systems
Several agents may form a multi-agent system. A multiple-agent system will not have all data or all methods available to achieve an objective and thus will have to collaborate with other agents. Also, there may be little or no global control and thus such systems are sometimes referred to as swarm systems. As with distributed agents, data is decentralized and execution is asynchronous.
Software agents
Agents, which carry out tasks relating to new updates for existing system, downloading and installing the updates when received.
Fuzzy agents
In computer science a fuzzy agent is a software agent that implements fuzzy logic. This software entity interacts with its environment through an adaptive rule-base and can therefore be considered as a type of intelligent agent
Stock agents
Software agents which carry out tasks relating to stock transactions including notifying you when the stock price reaching a preset price by e-mail or sms, providing updated technical analysis based on the latest market situations or maintaining the stock portfolio and giving warning signals when the portfolio is under performed.
References:
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw , An Introduction to Software Agents retrieving on May 29, 2009 from
http://agents.umbc.edu/introduction/01-Bradshaw.pdf
Software agent, retrived may 29, 2009 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent
2. Describe how techniques such as artificial intelligence and statistical techniques are used in software agent.
The intelligent agent can be programmed for the users’ aim, targets and preference with artificial intelligence. For example, a intelligent agent can be programmed with artificial intelligence to assist the users to search a specific type, model and color of car in the Internet including the negotiation on the price and closing the deal as well. Alternatively, the intelligent agent can just source the cars available in the Internet meeting the users’ requirement leaving the user to make the final decision.
Mobile agents are programmed with statistical techniques to enable them to monitor the network situation and utilization of system resources.
3. Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.
Commerce agents: Software agents which mediates between two companies having a business relationship.
Data management agents:Software agents carrying out tasks with corpora of data such as processing text from websites and producing summary with associated keywords.
Government agents: Software agents carrying out activities associated with government such as search government regulations, policies and statistics etc..
News agents: Software agents concerning tasks associated with web-based news services.
Shopping agent: it automatically updates the request information regarding products which customer is interested from e-commerce site.
Refference;
Wikimedia. (2009). Software agent. Retrieved May 29, 2009 from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent.
