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Software Agents

Introduction

Software agents are an effective tool for virtual organisations because they provide mechanisms to automate several activities, such as gathering and filtering information, negotiating deals and synchronising business processes and workflows. Intelligent software agents can work on behalf of human knowledge workers, be it supplier or buyer or both. 

Software agents find applications in a variety of domains, including: B2B e- commerce, Internet-based information systems, robotics, smart systems, decision support systems, data mining and knowledge discovery.

Need of Software Agents 

1) Managing the Information Overload: The growth of the internet has led to an information overload. Today, a search for a term or keyword, on any of the search engines, results in thousands of websites. Agents are required to filter and sort-out this information, into manageable volumes.  
2) Decision Support: Agents can provide increased support to knowledge workers in the sphere of decision-making, by generating an enormous number of options, pruning them internally, and prioritising them, using various decision support methodologies.  
3) Repetitive Tasks: Agents can be used to automate several of the repetitive, time- consuming, and boring tasks. This would reduce costs and increase productivity, as for many actions user behaviour can be modelled based upon past actions.  
4) Knowledge Base: Agents can be modelled to act as experts in specific areas, where expertise is costly or rare, by building a knowledge base. Typically. the agents store three levels of knowledge. These are as follows:
 
i) First, common knowledge that assists in translating the user requirements into terms and specifications that can be understood by agents. 
ii) Second, domain knowledge of a conceptual data model, based on the information of a particular domain.  
iii) The final level comprises of knowledge about how to deal with different implementations of the same conceptual model. It may include information on data format transformation and protocol transformation.

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