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INTRODUCTION
The main goal of this paper is to overview the rapidlyevolving area of software agents. The overuse of the word ëagentí has tended to mask the fact that, in reality, there is a trulyheterogeneous body of research being carried out under this banner. This paper places agents in context, defines them and then goes on,
inter alia
, to overview critically the rationales, hypotheses, goals,challenges and state-of-the-art demonstrators/prototypes of thevarious agent types currently under investigation. It also proceeds tooverview some other general issues which pertain to all the classesof agents identified. Finally, it speculates as to the future of theagents research in the short, medium and long terms. This paperlargely reviews software agents. Since we are overviewing a broadrange of agent types in this paper, we do not provide a definition of agenthood at this juncture. We defer such issues until Section
4
where we present our typology of agents. The breakdown of the paper is as follows. Section
2
notes thesituation of smart agents research in the broad field of DistributedArtificial Intelligence (DAI) and provides a brief history. Section
3
identifies the scope of applicability of agents research and notesthat there is a diverse range of interested parties. Before the corecritical overview of the agent typology of Section
5
, Section
4
provides our view of what smart agents are; it also identifies thedifferent types of agents which fall under the ëagentsí banner andwarns that
truly 
smart or intelligent agents do not yet exist! Theyare still very much the aspiration of agent researchers. Section
6
overviews some more general issues on agents and speculatesbriefly towards the future of agents in the short, medium and longterms. Section
7
concludes the paper.
 
History
Software agents have evolved from multi-agent systems (MAS),which in turn form one of three broad areas which fall under DAI, theother two being Distributed Problem Solving (DPS) and Parallel AI(PAI). Hence, as with multi-agent systems, they inherit many of DAIísmotivations, goals and potential benefits. For example, thanks todistributed computing, software agents inherit DAIís potentialbenefits including modularity, speed (due to parallelism) andreliability (due to redundancy). It also inherits those due to AI suchas operation at the knowledge level, easier maintenance, reusabilityand platform independence (Huhns & Singh,
1994
). The concept of an agent, in the context of this paper, can betraced back to the early days of research into DAI in the
1970
s -indeed, to Carl Hewittís concurrent Actor model (Hewitt,
1977
). In thismodel, Hewitt proposed the concept of a self-contained, interactiveand concurrently-executing object which he termed ëactorí. Thisobject had some encapsulated internal state and could respond tomessages from other similar objects: an actor
"is a computationalagent which has a mail address and a behaviour. Actors communicate bymessage-passing and carry out their actions concurrently"
Broadly, for the purposes of this paper, we split the research onagents into two main strands: the first spanning the period
1977
tothe current day, and the second from
1990
to the current day too.Strand 1 work on smart agents, which begun in the late
1970
s and allthrough the
1980
s to the current day, concentrated mainly ondeliberative-type agents with symbolic internal models; later in thispaper, we type these as collaborative agents. A deliberative agent is
"one that possesses an explicitly represented, symbolic model of theworld, and in which decisions are made via symbolic reasoning".
 
Initially, strand 1 work concentrated on
macro
issues such asthe interaction and communication between agents, thedecomposition and distribution of tasks, coordination andcooperation, conflict resolution via negotiation, etc. Their goal wasto specify, analyze, design and integrate systems comprising of multiple collaborative agents. These resulted in classic systems andwork such as the actor model (Hewitt,
1977
), MACE (Gasser
et al
.,
1987
), DVMT (Lesser & Corkill,
1981
), MICE (Durfee & Montgomery,
1989
), MCS (Doran
et al
.,
1990
), the contract network coordinationapproach (Smith, 1980; Davis & Smith,
1983
), MAS/DAI planning andgame theories (Rosenschein,
1985
; Zlotkin & Rosenschein,
1989
;
 
Rosenschein & Zlotkin,
1994
). These ëmacroí aspects of agents asGasser (
1991
) terms them, emphasises the
society 
of agents over
individual
agents, while
micro
issues relate specifically to the latter.In any case, such issues are well summarised in Chaib-draa
et al.
(
1992
), Bond & Gasser (
1988
) and Gasser & Huhns (
1989
). More recentwork under this strand include TÆMS (Decker & Lesser,
1993
; Decker,
1995)
DRESUN (Carver
et al
.,
1991
; Carver & Lesser,
1995
), VDT (Levitt
et al
.,
1994
), ARCHON (Wittig,
1992
; Jennings
et al
.,
1995
); Note that game theoretic work shouldarguably
not 
be classed as a macro approach; it may, indeed, liemore towards the micro end of the spectrum.In addition to the macro issues, strand
1
work has also beencharacterised by research and development into theoretical,architectural and language issues. In fact, such works evolvenaturally, though not exclusively, from the investigation of themacro issues. This is well summarised in Wooldridge & Jennings(
1995
a), and in the edited collections of papers: Wooldridge & Jennings (
1995
b
)
and Wooldridge
et al.
(
1996
).However, since
1990
or thereabouts, there has evidently beenanother distinct strand to the research and development work onsoftware agents -
the range of agent types being investigated is nowmuch broader 
. Thus, this paper is complementary to Wooldridge & Jenningsí (
1995
a) by placing emphasis on this strand although,naturally, there is some overlap, i.e. it overviews the broadeningtypology of agents being investigated by agent researchers. Somecynics may argue that this strand arises because everybody is nowcalling everything an agent, thereby resulting, inevitably, in suchbroadness. We sympathise with this viewpoint; indeed, it is a keymotivation for this paper - to overview the extensive work that goesunder the ëagentí banner. Essentially, our point is that in addition toinvestigating macro issues and others such as theories,architectures, languages, there has also been an unmistakable trendtowards the investigation of a broader range of agent types orclasses. The context of this paper is summarised in Table
1
below.
Strand Emphasis Some Major references
 Strand 1Macro issuesTheories, architectures &Bond & Gasser (1988)Gasser & Huhns (1989)
of 00

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