The paper presents two applications of intelligent agents to support the concept of adaptation defined in previous work. The concept of adaptation differs from the concept of intelligence and they do not necessarily associated with each other. Agent adapta
Adaptive Applications of Intelligent Agents
Ibrahim F. Imam
Department of Computer Science Arab Academy for Science and Technology
Cairo, Egypt
email:
satisfaction. Only the external actions of the agent are ABSTRACT
The paper presents two applications of intelligent agents
to support the concept of adaptation defined in previous work. The concept of adaptation differs from the concept of intelligence and they do not necessarily associated with each other. Agent adaptation is classified into three categories: internal, external and complete. Internal adaptation is concerned with the problem-solving algorithm; however, external adaptation is concerned with changes in the agent environment. The paper presents an automated travel agent that performs adaptive tasks using the AQDT-2 system for learning task-oriented decision structures. The AQDT-2 system can optimize the learning process according to a set of costs. The system allows defining costs for attributes, decisions, cases, and learning criteria. The system offers alternative decisions whenever it is impossible to reach an exact decision. Another application is presented for identification agent. The identification agent is implemented to recognize faces through pictures. The agent utilizes multiple classifiers to speed up the recognition process. The agent uses some of these classifiers to select the best classifier to recognize the given object. Other classifiers are used for identifying the object. The concept of adaptation is illustrated through out the two examples.
Key words: intelligent agent, adaptive behavior, machine learning.
1. Introduction
An agent is a machine or a system that accomplishes something the user needed without knowing how the agent did it, “You call it an agent when you want to treat it as a black box”[9]. An agent should have a set of tasks to perform for the user. These tasks define the scope and limitations of the agent. Intelligent agents utilize inferential or complex computational methodologies to accomplish their tasks. Usually, the methodologies adopted by the agent have no relationship to the user
recognized and may be evaluated by the user.
External actions of an intelligent agent are usually projections of internal commands or some results determined by a system or an algorithm. Adaptation in intelligent agents can be grouped into three categories based on the relationship between the internal adaptation and the external behaviors of the agent: 1) —where the internal systems used by the agent are adaptive, but the agent external actions do not reflect any adaptive behavior (e.g., an agent may optimize its search algorithm which improves its performance time, however, the agent still produces the same exact services to the user); 2) —where the internal systems of the agent are not adaptive, but the agent external actions reflect adaptive behavior (e.g., an irrigation robot utilizes a simple equation of the temperature and the humidity to irrigate a green house; the agent may irrigate the green house different number of times each day at different hours); 3) —where the internal systems of the agent are adaptive and the consequences of these adaptations are reflected on the agent external actions (e.g., a robot follows a plan and updates the plan based on its observations which in return changes the course of actions of the robot). Considering such classification, can be defined as systems or machines that utilize inferential or complex computational methodologies to modify or change control parameters, knowledge-bases, problem-solving methodologies, course of actions, or other objects in order to accomplish a set of tasks that are of interest to the user. Intelligent adaptive agents can effectively improve the use of many application systems for different domains including military or strategic planning, mechanical control, interactive multimedia, image and voice recognition, etc.
This paper introduces a framework for the development of intelligent adaptation in agents. The framework