Actor agents may be viewed as a specific instance of a personal agent with a certain role such as object modeler. Actor agents have a list of goals, tasks, processes in which they are involved with just like any individuals in business organization. Actor agents are mobile agents and get instantiated via HTTP get message when tasks are communicated. When the execution is complete, the status of an actor agent is updated back to the server. Each instance of actor agents has a unique ID and its behaviors may globally be changed by simply re-defining the default goals in the definition of specific actor agents.
Personal agents act on behalf of actual participants.
A personal agent coordinates various actor agents and prioritizes the participant's agenda based on time constraints. Upon login, personal agents retrieve the participant's main agenda page from the server and displays it on one of the available WWW browsers. The main agenda page allows the participant to be able to invoke various tools and examine a prioritized task list where each tasks is associated with a specific instance of an actor agent. The communication between agents is all text based. This requires minimal modifications to the HTTP protocol and allows the participants to understand the context in which agents communicate.