Intelligent Agents: a Tool for Managing and Retrieving Information in Distributed Systems
Francesco Bergadano, Antonio Puliafito, Salvatore Riccobene, Giancarlo Ruffo, Lorenzo Vita · 1996
Intelligent agents represent a powerful tool to implement distributed funtionalities into a network environment. This paper describes the current status of a research project whose target consists in using this new technology for automatic information retrieval, network management and security purposes within a distributed system. Specifically, we describe the software agents dedicated to information retrieval, focusing on architectural aspects and implementation issues. 1 Introduction An Intelligent Agent is a software module equipped with Artificial Intelligence mechanisms which is capable, autonomously or in cooperation with other agents, of solving a certain problem or carrying out a certain task. The more an agent is autonomous, userfriendly, capable of dealing with unexpected situations, of learning and improving its performance on the basis of its mistakes, or observations or instructions from the outside, the more intelligent it is considered to be. Literature provides sever...