They are regarded as a new paradigm enabling an important step forward in empirical sciences, technology and theory. This new paradigm has an enormous influence on model building and simulation. Novel design patterns and architectural structures are opening up new possibilities. Furthermore, new areas of application are coming into the foreground. Cooperative agents can be equipped with different attributes which however do not all appear to be necessary or useful in every application.
Every agent is characterised by autonomous behaviour.
This consists in the first instance of the so-called inherent dynamism that an intelligent agent displays autonomously without input from the environment. In addition there is the induced dynamism which describes how the intelligent agent reacts in response to inputs from the environment. Strategies that guide the behaviour of an agent when it is pursuing its goals are of particular importance here. Every agent has its own model of the external world that surrounds it. This so-called conceptual model describes how the intelligent agent sees the world.