Team Dynamics and Conflict Resolution

Understanding intelligent agents: analysis

and synthesis

John Fox, Martin Beveridge and David Glasspool

London Research Institute, Cancer Research UK, 44 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PX, UK

E-mail: {john.fox,martin.beveridge,david.glasspool}@cancer.org.uk

Abstract. Current views of intelligent agent technologies are reviewed with respect to (a) their general cognitive capabilities

and (b) the classic Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model. A benchmark agent model is developed as a basis for analyzing and

comparing agent systems. PROforma is an agent technology that has grown out of work in modeling medical expertise and the

benchmark is used to carry out a case study analysis of this technology, looking at it from three contrasting points of view:

logic programming, object-oriented programming and agent-oriented programming. These viewpoints yield different insights

into the strengths and weaknesses of PROforma and lead to a clarification and consolidation of the benchmark agent features. The

consolidated model offers a useful framework for analysis and comparison of other agent systems in medicine or other domains.

Keywords: Agent programming, object oriented programming, logic programming

1. Introduction

Research on "intelligent agents" has diverse motivations,

ranging from general theoretical interests in AI

to practical objectives of building flexible distributed

systems in specific application domains. As agent technologies

mature so also does the interest in applying

them in medicine. Agent technologies offer advanced

platforms for building expert systems to assist individual

clinicians in their work [20] and distributed agent

systems have the potential to improve the operation of

healthcare organizations, where failures of communication

and coordination are important sources of error

[6].

As computer science advances, however, there is a

danger that older technologies are neglected. Worse

still the advocates of different computing paradigms

sometimes engage in unhelpful disputes about the relative

weaknesses of their preferred approaches, rather

than looking for ways of combining their different

strengths. Historical examples include the debates

about logic programming versus functional programming,

object-oriented databases versus relational databases

and rapid prototyping versus formal software engineering.

No one view has a monopoly on insight,

however, and it would be desirable if novel paradigms

did not simply displace old ones but that new understanding

should accumulate on top of the old.

This paper presents a case study in analyzing and

understanding intelligent agent systems. This case is

PROforma, an agent language and technology which

has developed out of research in logic-based decision

making and autonomous systems [12], decisionsupport

and workflow agents [9] and plan and process

modeling [15]. The paper examines PROforma from

three points of view: logic programming, object-oriented

programming and agent-oriented programming.

Each perspective provides a different way of understanding

the technology, and reveals ways in which it

might be improved.

The paper is organized as follows. First, we briefly

review the "agent" concept, illustrating it with the classic

BDI model but also considering a wider range

of cognitive capabilities that the AI community has

traditionally been interested in. We define a benchmark

model that summarises many of these capabilities,

and then turn to the case study. The general conclusions

from the study are that although PROforma

can be viewed as an instance of the benchmark agent, it

also satisfies standard criteria of being logic-based and

object-oriented, and that all three perspectives provide

useful insights. The paper closes with a proposal for an

improved benchmark that synthesises the insights from

the three paradigms, and provides a generalmodelwith

which to compare proposals for agent systems.

0921-7126/03/$8.00 2003 - IOS Press. All rights reserved

Config: a case study in combining software

engineering techniques

David Maleya and Ivor Spenceb

aSt. Mary's University College, 191 Falls Road,

Belfast BT12 6FE, Northern Ireland, UK

E-mail: d.maley@stmarys-belfast.ac.uk

bQueen's