ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

UNIT-04

Ms. Neha Yadav

Assistant Professor
Applied Computational Science & Engineering
Software Agent
 software agent is an piece of software that functions as an agent for a user or
another program, working autonomously and continuously in a particular
environment.
 It is inhibited by other processes and agents, but is also able to learn from its
experience in functioning in an environment over a long period of time.

Intelligent Agent:
 Intelligent software agents are defined as being a software program that can
perform specific tasks for a user and possessing a degree of intelligence that
permits it to performs parts of its tasks autonomously and to interact with its
environment in a useful manner.”
Software Agent
Following are the main four rules for an AI agent:

 Rule 1: An AI agent must have the ability to perceive the

environment.
 Rule 2: The observation must be used to make decisions.
 Rule 3: Decision should result in an action.
 Rule 4: The action taken by an AI agent must be a rational action.
Architecture of Agents
1. Reactive architectures
2. Deliberative architectures
3. Blackboard architectures
4. Belief-desire-intention (BDI) architecture
5. Hybrid architectures
6. Mobile architectures
Reactive Agents
 The reactive agent architecture are sometime referred to as
behavioral, situated, and reactive.
 A reactive architecture is the simplest architecture for agents.
 In this architecture, agent behaviors are simply a mapping between
stimulus and response.
 The agent has no decision-making skills, only reactions to the
environment in which it exists.
Reactive Agents
 The agent simply reads the environment and then maps the state of the
environment to one or more actions. Given the environment, more than one
action may be appropriate, and therefore the agent must choose.
 The advantage of reactive architectures is that they are extremely fast.
 This kind of architecture can be implemented easily in hardware, or fast in
software lookup.
 The disadvantage of reactive architectures is that they apply only to simple
environments.
 Sequences of actions require the presence of state, which is not encoded into the
mapping function.
DELIBERATIVE ARCHITECTURES
A deliberative architecture, as the name implies, is one that
includes some deliberation(act of thinking and deciding
carefully) over the action to perform given the current set of
inputs.
Instead of mapping the sensors directly to the actuators, the
deliberative architecture considers the sensors, state, prior results
of given actions, and other information in order to select the best
action to perform.
The mechanism for action selection as is undefined. This is
because it could be a variety of mechanisms including a production
system, neural network, or any other intelligent algorithm.
DELIBERATIVE ARCHITECTURES
The advantage of the deliberative architecture is that it can be
used to solve much more complex problems than the reactive
architecture.
It can perform planning, and perform sequences of actions to
achieve a goal.
The disadvantage is that it is slower than the reactive
architecture due to the deliberation or the action to select.
DELIBERATIVE ARCHITECTURES
BLACKBOARD ARCHITECTURES
 The first blackboard architecture was HEARSAY-II, which was a speech
understanding system. This architecture operates around a global work area call the
blackboard.
 The blackboard is a common work area for a number of agents that work
cooperatively to solve a given problem.
 The blackboard therefore contains information about the environment, but also
intermediate work results by the cooperative agents.
 The blackboard contains the current state of the environment that is constantly
updated by the sensor agent, and when an action can be performed (as specified in
the blackboard), the action agent translates this action into control of the actuators.
 The control of the agent system is provided by one or more reasoning agents.
 These agents work together to achieve the goals, which would also be contained in
the blackboard.
BLACKBOARD ARCHITECTURES
Belief-desire-intension Agents
 The BDI agent architecture is based on Michael Bratman's philosophical
theory (Bratman 1987) that explains reasoning through the following
attitudes: beliefs, desires and intentions.
 Beliefs are the agent's model of the environment, basically what it believes to
be true. It's not knowledge as some of its beliefs might be false.
 Desires represent the ideal state of the environment for the agent. Like in the
human mind, these represent things we would like to see accomplished in the
future. A desire might be realistic or not, as it occurs with human thinking,
and may or may not be achievable.
 Intentions represent a subset of desires that the agent has taken as goals to
be accomplished soon.
 Belief represents the agent's model of the world, desire represents the
agent's goal(s) and intention represents the action choice.
BDI Architecture
Belief-desire-intension Agents

BRF: belief Revision Function

Belief-desire-intension Agents
Advantages
• It uses a standard human reasoning process to
reach to goal it is easy to understand.
• It has clear functional decomposition.
Disadvantage
•Difficulty lies in knowing how to efficiently
implement all BDI model functions.
HYBRID ARCHITECTURES
As is the case in traditional software architecture, most architectures
are hybrids.
For example, the architecture of a network stack is made up of a pipe-
and-filter architecture and a layered architecture.
This same stack also shares some elements of a blackboard
architecture, as there are global elements that are visible and used by
each component of the architecture.
The same is true for agent architectures. Based on the needs of the
agent system, different architectural elements can be chosen to meet
those needs.
MOBILE ARCHITECTURES
This architectural pattern introduces the ability for agents to
migrate themselves between hosts. The agent architecture includes
the mobility element, which allows an agent to migrate from one
host to another.
An agent can migrate to any host that implements the mobile
framework.
The mobile agent framework provides a protocol that permits
communication between hosts for agent migration.
MOBILE ARCHITECTURES
Multiagent and Agent communication
 While acting in real world and agent may not be always in Singleton mode.It has
to deal with the situation wherein other agents and related factors are affecting
the agents environment.
 Such systems wherein multiple agent work together, communicate, co-operate
and deal with the situation are termed as multi agent system.
 Multi agent system are essentially distributed systems which more efficient in the
sense that they can be optimized and are mostly easier to understand and easier to
develop especially when the problem being solved is itself distributed.
 Data and information itself is distributed is spinning at different geographical
locations and needs to be handled through multiple agents.
 Data can come from various domains and multiple devices or components are
involved in data generation.
 The system itself is too big and complex that needs to be separated in multiple
components so as to reduce its complexity and size that can be handled easily.
Multiagent system characteristics
Each agent has just incomplete information and is restricted in its
capabilities.
The system control is distributed.
Data is decentralized.
Computation is asynchronous.
Multi agent environments are typically open and have no
centralized design.
Multi agent environments have agents that are autonomous and
distributed and maybe self interested.
Negotiation and Bargaining
• Negotiation: discussions at which people try to decide or agree something.
• Bargaining: to discuss prices, conditions, etc. with somebody in order to
reach an agreement that suits each person
 In a multi agent system negotiation is form of interaction that occurs among
agents with different goals.
 Major challenges of negotiation and bargaining is to allocate scars
resources among agents representing self interested parties the resources
can be bandwidth commodities money processing power etc.
 The resource becomes scarce as competing claims for it can be
simultaneously satisfied.
 Negotiation and bargaining is a process by which a joint decision is reached
by two or more agents each trying to reach an individual goals or objective.
Negotiation and Bargaining
The resultant negotiation mechanism should ideally have the following
attributes:
 Efficiency: the agents should not waste resources in coming to an
agreement.
 Stability: no agent should have an incentive to deviate from agreed-
upon strategies.
 Simplicity: the negotiation mechanism should impose low
computational and bandwidth demands on the agents.
 Distribution: the mechanism should not require a central decision
maker.
 Symmetry: the mechanism should not be biased against any agent for
arbitrary or inappropriate reasons.
Trust and Reputation in Multiagent system
Trust and Reputation in Multiagent system
Trust and Reputation in Multiagent system
Trust and Reputation in Multiagent system
• TMS is designed to ensure the integrity of an agent's
knowledge, which should be stable, well founded and
logically consistent.
• In a multi agent system, a group of agents can form a
small society in which they play different kinds of role. The
group defines the rules and the rules define the commitments
associated with them.
• When an agent joins a group, he joins in one or more roles
and acquires the commitments of the role.