Agent's Structure

- Agent's Structure

An agent perceives and acts in an environment, has an architecture, and is implemented by an agent program. To understand the structure of Intelligent Agents, we should be familiar with architecture and agent program. Architecture is the machinery that the agent executes on. It is a device with sensors and actuators, for example : a robotic car, a camera, a PC. Agent program is an implementation of an agent function. An agent function is a map from the percept sequence (history of all that an agent has perceived till date) to an action.

Agent = Architecture + Agent Program
Architecture = the machinery that an agent executes on.
Agent Program = an implementation of an agent function
 
To actively perform their functions, Intelligent Agents today are normally gathered in a hierarchical structure containing many “sub-agents”. Intelligent sub-agents process and perform lower level functions. Taken together, the intelligent agent and sub-agents create a complete system that can accomplish difficult tasks or goals with behaviors and responses that display a form of intelligence. 

Agent’s structure can be viewed as:  

For enterprises, intelligent agents can be used for applications in data mining, data analytics and customer service and support (CSS). Consumers can also use intelligent agents to compare the prices of similar products and notify the user when a website update occurs.  

AI assistants, like Alexa and Siri, are examples of intelligent agents as they use sensors to perceive a request made by the user and the automatically collect data from the Internet without the user's help. They can be used to gather information about its perceived environment such as weather and time. Autonomous vehicles could also be considered intelligent agents as they use sensors, GPS and cameras to make reactive decisions based on the environment to maneuver through traffic.