What Is an Agent?

An Agent is a software entity or a logical model that acts autonomously, without any user intervention. It has the ability to react to its environment and make decisions. Agents are not activated per se but they activate themselves as and when the need arises. Agents carry further the concept behind Object Oriented Development. Objects are defined by their data and their methods. Agents are used in Component Oriented development and are defined by their behavior.
An Agent has the following characteristics:

• Purposeful : is goal driven and pro active
• Reactive : as opposed to deliberative; performs tasks in response to actions
• Autonomous : does not need human intervention for decision making or achievement of goals
• Communication Ability : capability of coordination with other agents in the neighborhood to work towards solution of a problem
• Collaborative : works collectively to achieve a goal; as in Multi-agent systems
• Adaptability : perceive the context in which they operate and react to it appropriately
• Learning Ability: ability to learn from past experiences and make intelligent decisions based on that
• Evolvable: ability to alter behavior in response to environment

Various agents in literature have been developed to perform the following tasks:
· Personal information assistants
· Data Mining
· Mail Filtering
· Travel Planning
· Interface provider
· Meeting Scheduler
· Information Broker

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