Simplifying the Development of Intelligent Agents

Intelligent agents is a powerful Artificial Intelligence technology which shows considerable promise as a new paradigm for mainstream software development. However, despite their promise, intelligent agents are still scarce in the market place. A key reason for this is that developing intelligent agent software requires significant training and skill: a typical developer or undergraduate struggles to develop good agent systems using the Belief Desire Intention (BDI) model (or similar models). This paper identifies the concept set which we have found to be important in developing intelligent agent systems and the relationships between these concepts. This concept set was developed with the intention of being clearer, simpler, and easier to use than current approaches. We also describe briefly a (very simplified) example from one of the projects we have worked on (RoboRescue), illustrating the way in which these concepts are important in designing and developing intelligent software agents.