Agents: How to get started

• What's an agent?
  Is it an Agent, or just a Program?: A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents,
  by Stan Franklin and Art Graesser
  
  

• Another quite good intro (with lots of good links) on the web is:
  Agent-Based Engineering, the Web, and Intelligence,
  by Charles J. Petrie
  
  

• Also see the pages:
  • A gentle introduction to agents and their applications, by Michael Weiss.
  • Towards a Standardization of Multi-Agent System Frameworks, by Roberto A. Flores-Mendez.
  
  

• A nice survey paper is:
  Wooldridge, Michael and Nicholas R. Jennings (1995), "Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages: a Survey," in Wooldridge and Jennings Eds., Intelligent Agents, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1-22

  http://www.elec.qmw.ac.uk/dai/pubs/KER95/ or
  http://www.elec.qmw.ac.uk/dai/people/mikew/pubs/ker95/ker95-html.html or
  http://www.doc.mmu.ac.uk/STAFF/mike/ker95/ker95-html.html
  or, in postscript:
  http://www.elec.qmw.ac.uk/dai/people/mikew/pubs/ker95.ps or
  http://agents.umbc.edu/introduction/ker.ps

  
  

• Another good overview paper is:
  Jennings, N. R., Sycara, K., and Wooldridge, M., A Roadmap of Agent Research and Development Int Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 1 (1) 7-38, 1998.

  ftp://ftp.elec.qmw.ac.uk/pub/isag/distributed-ai/publications/aa-mas.ps.gz

  
  

• More specialized, but still a tutorial, is:

  • Agent Communication Languages, by Tim Finin and Yannis Labrou (pdf)
  
  

• The best web collection of Agent resources is by Tim Finin. It includes an `intro to agents' list similar to this one.
  UMBC AgentWeb