Developing Intelligent Agents for Distributed Systems: Exploring Architectures, Techniques, and Applications

This practical and comprehensive guide explains what intelligent agents (IAs) are, how systems of agents can collaborate to solve difficult problems, the kinds of commercially-available technologies that can be used to build them, and how they can make todayOs and tomorrowOs computer and communications systems easier to manage and use. The authors present and discuss virtually all aspects of agent technology including: Artificial intelligence technologies like expert systems and fuzzy logic, object-orientation, agent architectures, design considerations such as OS requirements, security, client-server and peer-to-peer networks, the Internet and WWW, languages (e.g., Java, Telescript and Distributed Smalltalk), tools and development environments, applications of IAs and the future of IA technology.