Designing behaviors for information agents

Abstract

To facilitate the rapid development and open system interoper-ability of autonomous agents we need to carefully specify and effectively implement various classes of agent behaviors. Our current focus is on the behaviors and underlying architecture of WWW-based autonomous software agents that collect and supply information to humans and other computational agents. This paper discusses a set of architectural building blocks that support the specification of behaviors for these information agents in a way that allows periodic actions, interleaving of planning and execution, and the concurrent activation of mul-tiple behaviors with asynchronous components. We present an initial set of information agent behaviors, including responding to repetitive queries, monitoring information sources, advertis-ing capabilities, and self cloning. We have implemented and tested these behaviors on the WWW in the context of WAR-REN, an open multi-agent organization for financial portfolio management.