1. Lecture 4 – Bond Agents What is a software agent? Mobility
The Bond Agent Model.

2. What is a software agent
It depends whom you ask:
Someone from the distributed objects community: “ a software agent is an active mobile object”.
An AI person: “A software agent is code capable to exhibit autonomous and intelligent behavior:
Infer new facts given a set of rules and facts.
Plan
Learn.
Us: a software agent is a mobile entity capable of intelligent behavior.

3. Agent dimensions

4. Agent-world interactions

5. Mobility
Physical Mobility
Code Mobility

8. Code mobility Strong mobility: Weak mobility: anywere, anytime.
only to some places
only at specific moments of time

9. Objectives for the design of Bond
Assemble dynamically an agent from reusable components.
Create an open-ended environment for agents.
Support concurrency.
Allow changes in the agent behavior.
Support weak agent mobility.

10. Multi-plane state machines  different facets of activity:
Bond components
Multi-plane state machines  different facets of activity:
User-interractions
Reasoning…..
Strategies: code executable when an agent enters a state.
Model of the word  shared memory allowing strategies in the same plane or in different planes to communicate.

11. From agent description, to agent creation and to execution
Blueprint: an agent description language.
An agent factory interprets the agent description and generates an internal data structure that controls the run-time behavior of the agent.

13. The structure of a strategy

16. Agent surgery Dynamic modification of an agent.
The agent factory uses a surgical blueprint to modify the agent, then generates a modified blueprint.

18. Agent migration
Done at the request of a beneficiary who may supply a migration blueprint.
12 step process desribed in the text at page