February 9, 2004
The field of software agents has still not quite completely emerged from the research labs. There have been many research projects and many of them have made great progress, but the number of successful commercial ventures is still quite limited. There are still many issues and unsolved problems for which additional research is needed.
Research efforts and early-stage commercial ventures are showing tantalizing progress, but "close" is not yet good enough.
A number of early efforts that showed great promise have fallen by the way side. Part of the problem is that we don't yet have a sufficient number of field-proven examples of applications where software agent technology was the key to success. People see all this neat new technology, but are somewhat baffled as to how it can be used, how it should be used, and how to actually use it today.
Some earlier efforts in software agents have morphed and lost their "agent" label as they have been integrated into other sub-fields of software. For example, IBM is now into Autonomic Computing and Business Rules. We now talk about Web Services and Grid Computing. Some of this "loss" may be natural and reflect a maturing of the field. In some cases "agent" was simply a jargon/marketing buzzword anyway. And in some cases it may simply reflect a lack of a clear understanding of how the field of software agent technology is defined.
There is also the question of how an agent-based software system contrasts with a mere distributed software system. In other words, why use agents rather than simply standard operating system processes and TCP/IP communications. Or, the contrast with traditional views of agents and the newer concepts of web services and grid computing.
I expect that a number of concepts that are currently "part" of software agent technology will evolve and be subsumed by the traditional sub-fields of software. Some bases may spawn off entire, separate sub-fields. For example, Emergent Behavior or even Emergent Intelligence may be truly separable from software agents. But at the same time, emergence may depend on specific capabilities which are provided by software agent technology.
My forecast is that it will be another year or two before we see even a few "killer apps" based on software agent technology. And then it will be three to five years before "agent apps" become common. And maybe five to ten years for agent technology to become dominant. Software agent-based software will be at its zenith ten to twenty years from now.
The big unanswered question is the extent to which software agent tool and solution providers will profit from this slowly ramping up trend, or whether most of the technology evolves as free open source.
The European Commission AgentLink initiative's Agent Technology Roadmap gives a fair assessment of where the field is and where it could go in the years ahead. But, the bottom line is that we aren't there yet. [Note: the Roadmap is a year old and expected to be revised by the end of 2004]
The new book from Michael Luck, et al, "Agent-Based Software Development " also give a representative view of the state of the art.
Please see our Software Agents Links page for a comprehensive list of web-based resources for software agent technology.
Please see my Software Agent Manifesto for my views on how the technology should evolve.
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Updated: February 08, 2006 08:59:20 PM -0500
Copyright © 2005 John W. Krupansky d/b/a Base Technology