Building an Agent: For Example

Abstract

Since the emergence of agent technology, there have been many papers and articles written on the advantages and use of the technology. In particular, in the last two years, the number of papers discussing the use of agent systems seems to have risen exponentially. Whether this rise in the interest of agent technology corresponds to the emergence of eCommerce, Internet banking and the explosion in Web-based systems, or the maturity of the technology and programming languages used to develop them is another matter. For people interested in the technology and wanting to build their own agents, most of the material provides little insight in how to actually build an agent. This chapter discusses the problem of actually building an agent using an example of an “email helper” agent.