Intelligent adaptive information agents

Adaptation in open, multi-agent information gathering systems is important for several reasons. These reasons include the inability to accurately predict future problem-solving workloads, future changes in existing information requests, future failures and additions of agents and data supply resources, and other future task environment characteristic changes that require system reorganization. We have developed a multi-agent distributed system infrastructure, RETSINA (REusable Task Structure-based Intelligent Network Agents) that handles adaptation in an open Internet environment. Adaptation occurs both at the individual agent level as well as at the overall agent organization level. The RETSINA system has three types of agents. Interface agents interact with the user receiving user specifications and delivering results. They acquire, model, and utilize user preferences to guide system coordination in support of the user's tasks. Task agents help users perform tasks by formulating problem solving plans and carrying out these plans through querying and exchanging information with other software agents. Information agents provide intelligent access to a heterogeneous collection of information sources. In this paper, we concentrate on the adaptive architecture of the information agents. We use as the domain of application WARREN, a multi-agent financial portfolio management system that we have implemented within the RETSINA framework. © 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers.