Editing Distributed artificial intelligence (section)

==Agents==
===Systems: Agents and multi-agents===
{{Further|Multi-agent system#Applications}}

Notion of Agents: Agents can be described as distinct entities with standard boundaries and interfaces designed for problem solving.

Notion of Multi-Agents: Multi-Agent system is defined as a network of agents which are loosely coupled working as a single entity like society for problem solving that an individual agent cannot solve.

===Software agents===
The key concept used in DPS and MABS is the abstraction called [[software agent]]s. An agent is a virtual (or physical) [[Wiktionary:autonomy|autonomous]] entity that has an understanding of its environment and acts upon it. An agent is usually able to communicate with other agents in the same system to achieve a common goal, that one agent alone could not achieve. This communication system uses an [[agent communication language]].

A first classification that is useful is to divide agents into:
* reactive agent – A reactive agent is not much more than an automaton that receives input, processes it and produces an output.
* deliberative agent – A [[deliberative agent]] in contrast should have an internal view of its environment and is able to follow its own plans.
* hybrid agent – A hybrid agent is a mixture of reactive and deliberative, that follows its own plans, but also sometimes directly reacts to external events without deliberation.

Well-recognized agent architectures that describe how an agent is internally structured are:
* [[ASMO (cognitive architecture)|ASMO]] (emergence of distributed modules)
* [[BDI software agent|BDI]] (Believe Desire Intention, a general architecture that describes how plans are made)
* [[InterRAP]] (A three-layer architecture, with a reactive, a deliberative and a social layer)
* PECS (Physics, Emotion, Cognition, Social, describes how those four parts influences the agents behavior).
* [[Soar (cognitive architecture)|Soar]] (a rule-based approach)