A Thorough Insight into Theoretical and Practical Developments in MultiAgent Systems

Agent Based Computing: Is It Supreme Than Its Counterparts?

The concept of software agents have evolved from Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) (Ferber, 1999) research which was conducted about 3 decades ago.Carl Hewitt proposed an Actor system (Hewitt, Bishop & Steiger, 1973)and defined actors with clear internal definitions with the potential to communicate with peers in the system. The succeeding developments focused on making intelligent actors now known as software agents where the word agent has evolved from Greek word ‘agein’, which implies to guide (Milojicic, 2000). The term is being explored by research fraternity continuously and many reports pertaining to the developments in agent oriented techniques that enable a more active role of the computers in knowledge acquisition have been contributed. In the domain of computer science, a software agent is a special software entity dedicated to perform an assigned task on behalf of a human or an object (Nwana, 1996).

Following definition has been adopted from (Smith, Cypher & Spohrer, 1994) and the agent is known as KidSim Agent, in particular.