Agent based systems also offer high levels of flexibility and robustness in dynamic or unpredictable environments by virtue of their intrinsic autonomy. Agents facilitate knowledge sharing within a business since they require a common metadata model describing what and where the information is that they use, and how the information translates into business semantics. Agents allow learning capabilities to be incorporated in a natural way, enabling agent behaviour to change with time based on acquired experience. For example, in a decision support environment, patterns of information usage by individual users might be used to influence the prioritisation of future suggested actions in particular situations. We are currently working in several projects to assess and explore the value of agent based approaches to different application domains.
Agents provide the brokering, negotiation and payment settlement services.
We have also developed an agent based system that enables internet applications to make better use of available resources including mirror servers and network capacity. We believe that systems based on software agents can enable the delivery of an important new class of decision support solutions in businesses that have already invested in data warehousing. The business problems and opportunities addressable by this class of solutions can be characterised by the following. They are currently either not addressed by the established processes in a business or they are addressed via ad hoc processes in human resource intensive ways.