[ Please note: The project has been discontinued as of May 31, 2005 and is superseded by the projects of the ii Labs. There won't be further updates to these pages. ]

(Related publications: [PUBLink] [PUBLink])

Wooldridge and Jennings [PUBLink] provide a useful starting point by defining autonomy, social ability, reactivity and proactiveness as essential properties of an agent. Agent research is a wide area covering a variety of topics. These include:

• Distributed Problem Solving (DPS)
  The agent concept can be used to simplify the solution of large problems by distributing them to a number of collaborating problem-solving units. DPS is not considered here, EXCALIBUR's agents being fully autonomous: Each agent has individual goals, and there is no superior common goal.
• Multi-Agent Systems (MAS)
  MAS research deals with appropriate ways of organizing agents. These include general organizational concepts, the distribution of management tasks, dynamic organizational changes like team formation and underlying communication mechanisms.
• Autonomous Agents
  Research on autonomous agents is primarily concerned with the realization of a single agent. This includes topics like sensing, models of emotion, motivation, personality, and action selection and planning. This field is our main focus within the EXCALIBUR project.

An agent has goals (stay alive, catch player's avatar, ...), can sense certain properties of its environment (see objects, hear noises, ...), and can execute specific actions (walk northward, eat apple, ...). There are some special senses and actions dedicated to communicating with other agents.

The following subsections classify different agent architectures according to their trade-off between computation time and the realization of sophisticated goal-directed behavior.

• Reactive Agents
• Triggering Agents
• Deliberative Agents
• Hybrid Agents
• Anytime Agents

For questions, comments or suggestions, please contact us.

Last update:
May 19, 2001 by Alexander Nareyek