Agents – The Challenge of Relevance to the IT Mainstream

Abstract

In the 10 years since the first ATAL workshop was held, Agent and Multi-Agent Systems have been a spectacular growth area of research in Computer Science. The field has certainly developed in terms of indicators such as number of publications, conferences and workshops. A view now expressed by many in the agent research community, and others, is that agents represent the ’next big thing’ in software development and are poised to supplant object-oriented approaches. But is there any realistic prospect of this happening? Is the state-of-the-art in agents and the focus of agent research really relevant to enterprise computing? What might enterprise-ready agent technology look like? What factors would drive enterprises to invest in such solutions? This talk will attempt to analyze underlying issues and offer some answers to these questions.