Agents in the Enterprise

Paul Taylor,
Peter Evans-Greenwood,
James Odell.
Agentis International,
1990 N. California Blvd, Suite 400,
Walnut Creek, CA 94596, USA.
2/33 Lincoln Square South, Carlton,
Victoria, 3053, Australia.
{ptaylor|pevansg|jodell}@agentissoftware.com

Abstract
The discovery of useful applications of agent technology is currently generating considerable
interest in both research and business domains. The term agent technology refers to a bag of
software technologies and methods that realise systems comprised of multiple autonomous,
goal-seeking agents that employ cooperation and collaboration to automate or systematise
some problem space that existing technologies cannot. This paper cites analysis on the
adoption of agent technologies and surveys the characteristics of todays enterprise computing
environment to build a case for the use of agent technology. Relevant characteristics of the
technology that appear useful in the enterprise context include anthropomorphism (as a basis
for decomposing complex, loosely coupled business systems), adaptability and the ability to
manage change, and the concept of deploying multi-agent-based solution architectures one
agent at a time, such that each individual agent enacts both a valuable point of automation in
its own right and a node in a multi-agent solution. We report on Agentis experience in
pursuing this approach by using three indicative agent-based solutions.

Introduction

A new generation of software tools and techniquescollectively known as agent technology

promises to manage, in real time, the complexities of todays enterprise. Although there have been
notable successes of enterprise-scale agent-based solutions to date, most have been in narrow industrial
domains (such as robotics and flexible manufacturing) or applications involving simulation within
equally constrained business domains. These are important classes of applications but they do not
break from the technologys roots in research, nor do they significantly advance the more widespread
adoption of agent technology.
We are interested in the benefits that the technology can bring to enterprise computing rather than in
the technology per se. This paper surveys the characteristics of todays enterprise (and its computing
environment) and builds a case for the application of agent technology. Agent technology gives the
solution architect a set of natural structures for designing enterprise solutions and applications. We
believe that anthropomorphism is a useful basis for decomposing the next generation of complex,
loosely coupled business systems. An anthropomorphic approach provides useful mappings between
people (who perform situated acts in an essentially social context) and agents (which enact roles, pursue
goals, have perception and beliefs, and follow plans toward intentions) that perform collaborative work
on behalf of people.

Agentis International 2005 Taylor, Evans-Greenwood, Odell

AGENTS IN THE ENTERPRISE

ASWEC 2005

But structure is only one dimension of a successful enterprise solution. The enterprise imposes strict
constraints on its systems, and some of these contradict the assumptions underlying established agentoriented approaches and agent runtime platforms. Previous attempts at deploying agents in the
enterprise have failed partially because they have not adequately considered the essential characteristics
of enterprise systems, such as performance, scalability, reliability, business transparency, and
adaptability. We offer some pragmatic solutions to each of these problemsan approach based on
bringing agents to the enterprise, rather than the enterprise to agent technology.
1.1

The Promise of Agent Technology in the Enterprise

Software agents are autonomous problem-solving computational entities that can demonstrate more
effective operation in dynamic and open environments than can traditional technologies. In the
enterprise, individual agents can automate complex control and monitoring behaviours not possible
with current technologies, or they can operate in collaboration with other agents (including both people
and software) to achieve automation in highly dynamic and complex environments.
Agents go beyond objects (for example, Java objects) in that they implement autonomy by exercising
choice over their internal actions and external interactions. An agent may exercise autonomy by
selecting what processing to perform (at runtime, based on prevailing conditions) to achieve a particular
goal. Agents in a multi-agent system may collaborate to achieve individual or shared objectives.
Unlike objects, agents may be assigned one or more goals or tasks by their owners and then set running
to achieve those goals. Agent-based systems are implemented using a wide range of current
technologies, including object-oriented languages and distributed object services, Web Services,
directories, and many others.
The development of agent technologies is surfacing a range of specific techniques and algorithms for
dealing with interactions in dynamic, open environments. These include solutions, patterns, protocols
and standards for balancing reaction and deliberation in individual agents, learning from and about
other agents in the environment, eliciting and acting upon user preferences, finding ways to negotiate
and cooperate with other agents, and developing means of forming and managing coalitions. Multiagent solutions map naturally to problem spaces typified by complexity, loose coupling, dynamism and
collaboration, where exiting agents (normally people) employ a high degree of autonomy,
specialisation, interpretation and skill to plan, resolve deals, allocate resources or negotiate paths. For
example, multi-agent systems are providing faster and more effective methods of resource allocation in
complex environments, such as the management of utility networks, than human-centred approaches.
In businesses where timely provisioning or customer servicing is important (such as
telecommunications), agents are monitoring and managing provisioning processes and the overarching
service level agreements. In healthcare, agents are automating patient monitoring and providing
intelligent integration of monitoring devices. Other applications can be found anywhere where markets,
economies or societies, or biological environments need to be monitored or managed (Agentlink III,
2004).
1.2

The Current State of Agent Technology Adoption

Agent technologys broad and encompassing base makes assessments and predictions on its adoption
in organisations difficult. Gartners July 2004 analysis places various agent technologies, application
domains and drivers at different points in the adoption cycle (Gartner 2004a-f). In the infrastructure
domain, business process execution languages (BPEL) are on the rise with between 1% and 5% market
penetration. Basic Web Services for service definition and application integration (using SOAP and
WSDL) are achieving mainstream adoption as evidenced by implementation by major software
vendors, with 20% to 50% market penetration. Advanced Web Services offering higher quality of
service (to enable advanced business-critical functions over standards-based networks using SOAP,
WSDL, UDDI, WS-Security and WS-R) depend on the availability and maturity of standards, and
implementations are not yet fully available from vendors.
Gartner observes that narrow business domains for the technology have not yet emerged, but that this
demand is currently expressed in the building momentum of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web
the adoption of metadata and protocols so that machines can automatically process, integrate and reason

Agentis International 2005 Taylor, Evans-Greenwood, Odell

AGENTS IN THE ENTERPRISE

ASWEC 2005

about data across different applicationshas less than 1% market penetration. Another current
transformational concept, the Trading Grid (an interconnection of networks and marketplaces to
support virtual organisations) is also at the very start of the adoption cycle. Electronic markets
(eMarketplaces) now have up to 5% market penetration. Each of these domains and technology
families are predicted by Gartner to take up to 10 years to plateau.
Intelligent agents as a whole are perceived as having been over-hyped to date. However, selfservice agents (a specific type of intelligent agent that acts on a customers or businesss behalf to
automate transactions) are catching on and have reached up to 5% penetration. In all these cases,
however, these are lightweight agents and applications of agents, with the mainstream of agent
technologies still to engage the marketplace.

Agent-based Systems in the Enterprise

Todays enterprise computing environment is demanding of applications in terms of performance and

scalability, adaptability, and verifiability. Because of this, many successful agent prototypes fail when
moved into production environments. Enterprise-class workloads, for example, are typified by high
volumes of relatively simple transactions, and relatively fixed interaction patterns. By contrast, most
multi-agent runtime platforms support low volumes but complex interactions with each other and with
their environment.
The task of mapping agent concepts and the necessary runtime support services onto enterprise
transaction platforms (such as J2EE) is not a trivial process. Important issues include dealing with
threads, knowing when and how to use stateless and stateful objects in an agents implementation, agent
identity, object and database locking, support for the EJB containers interface, efficient agent belief or
data persistence, and support for loosely-coupled inter-agent communication. Other important
characteristics of the enterprise that an agent-based system must address include reliability,
extensibility, maintainability, and the need to coexist in todays highly secured and intensively managed
operational environments. Each of these issues requires the application of a range of techniques and
approaches to reach a workable solution. Agent platforms (and agent product vendors who claim
enterprise-ready runtime and operational platforms) must have viable enterprise technology foundations
as well as solid answers to all of these concerns.
2.1

Agents and Business Process Automation

A critical concern in mapping agents onto enterprise application architectures is the positioning of
agents in the landscape of services (specifically Web Services and WSDL), and business process
automation. The current momentum of vendor support behind the emerging business process modelling
(BPM) standards will ensure rapid and global adoption of web services, investment in BMP tools and
creation of BPEL models, and the widespread deployment of BPEL engines in medium to large
enterprises.
Agents most naturally fit at the business process orchestration level of an enterprises technology
stack, from where they can monitor the enterprise environment and take action to pursue goals. Figure
1 illustrates agents as controllers in the enterprise technology stack. Adoption of enterprise
orchestration agents will not happen quickly, however, for several reasons. Firstly, the enterprises
existing software and business process controllers are deeply embedded inside monolithic applications
such as ERP, MRP and call-centre solutions. Secondly, enterprises will (correctly) be cautious about
delegating control of business-critical processes to a new class of software application and underlying
technology, new products, and new vendors. As a consequence, the take-up of the technology in the
enterprise will not be rapid (as Gartner predicts).
However, much can be achieved by relatively simple but nonetheless useful point-solutions and
simple multi-agent solutions. Initially, we expect to see agents as natural providers of complex services
to the business process execution plane, or as non-invasive monitors operating off to one side of the
enterprise technology stack. Agents will incrementally advise, and then over time, begin to replace
human operators in an enterprises business process architecture. Figure 1 therefore represents the to
be picture for agents as process controllers in the enterprise.

Agentis International 2005 Taylor, Evans-Greenwood, Odell

AGENTS IN THE ENTERPRISE

ASWEC 2005

Agent System

BPM

Workflow

EAI

Transport

System

Application

Resource

Figure 1: Agents as controllers in the enterprise technology stack.

On the surface, BPM appears to present a mismatch between business process execution and an agentorchestrated business processes, since BPEL provides a formal, executable notation for modelling
business processes, without explicit regard for dynamic, in situ agent-based decision-making. Put
another way, BPEL requires the modeller to have anticipated all possible paths at modelling time and
does not support constructs that explicitly support agent-like decision-making. Further down the track,
we consider that agents will populate the business process execution layer, adding value to BPML
execution by adding heuristic, goal-directed behaviours in places where BPML exceptions become
unwieldy or humans would otherwise need to be involved.
Agent technology allows us to leverage ideas from economics and complex systems theory to create
applications that exhibit the adaptability of systems observed in the natural world. The technologys
non-linear, goal-based trial-and-error nature simplifies the capture of complex business decisions.
Business processes that were previously too exception-rich to be automated (for example, real-time
logistics management and optimization, or mortgage approval) will become reachable with agent tools.
Where agents are embedded in enterprise business process flows, they will facilitate new levels of
adaptability by allowing continuous and incremental process change (and process improvement)
without downtime.
2.2

Semantic Gap

We see other benefits to the business from socially structured, agent-based business systems. The
agent paradigm lifts the level of abstraction at which the enterprise system designer works. Increasing
the solution design and programming abstraction levels also allows us to reduce the language barrier
between a business stake-holders understanding of the business problem and its agent-based solution.
The task of implementing business knowledge in an enterprise application normally falls to
application designers and developers. Agent technology promises to eliminate this effort by allowing
business analysts and stakeholders to work in the language of the problem (the agents, goals, and
relationships). Agent-based solutions will achieve a higher level of transparency by allowing business
stakeholders to directly validate implemented functionality, thereby improving business confidence and
avoiding the constant friction between the businesss understanding of requirements and the developers
implementation in a programming language that is opaque to business people. The business results are
reduced time-to-market, increased quality, and responsiveness to change.

Agentis International 2005 Taylor, Evans-Greenwood, Odell

AGENTS IN THE ENTERPRISE

2.3

ASWEC 2005

Examples of Agent-based Point Solutions in the Enterprise

Individual agents that provide point-solutions to complex problems can have particularly high
business value. Agentis has developed a number of such solutions. These are typically conceived as an
agent solution to automate a humans decision-making function in a workflow that has proved to be
troublesome in the past. These agents are usually deployed as single, standalone agent services in an
enterprises Service Oriented Architecture. Figure 2 illustrates an indicative story.
Mortgage Processing
Approved
I ncoming Fax

Receive Applic ation

D etails

Manual Data
E ntry

Credit / Policy
Changes

Mortgage Sys tem

Validation

D ocument P reparation
and Dis tribution

U nderwriting

Approved Subject To and

Refe rrals

Work Queue
A GENTI S

Trigger event on arrival of

external data

Work Queue

Assessor
Assessor
Assessor
Assessor
Assessor
Assessor
Assessor
Assessor

Team 1

Validator
Validator
Validator
Validator

Supe rvisor Console

Validator
Validator
Validator

Validator

Team 2

Agentis MRA Demonstration Component

F i g u r e 2 : A u t o ma t i n g mo r t g a g e a p p l i c a t i o n s u s i n g a p o i n t - s o l u t i o n a g e n t .

In this example, which was prepared for an Australian bank, a single agent was deployed to extend the
existing automation of mortgage applications. The banks existing mainframe-based legacy mortgage
application processor (shown as Mortgage System in the figure) was difficult to change for a variety
of reasons, and as a consequence, its approval rate was down to only 55% of applications. The
remaining 45% of applications rejected by the processor were redirected to a pool of human operators
who performed manual re-assessment. Most of these were subsequently approved, often as a result of
(legitimately) re-interpreting the data on the application form and by applying new business rules,
conventions and heuristics.
Agentis worked with these operators to mine their expert practices and heuristics, modelled them as
goal-directed business rules using the Agentis AdaptivEnterprise business process modelling notation,
developed the BDI agent and verified its behaviour on large numbers of applications from the legacy
processor. This agent quickly achieved a further 22% acceptance rate. As well, it was able to perform
skills-based routing to direct the twice-rejected applications (which could not be automatically reassessed) to smaller, more highly skilled manual assessment teams within the bank. This more
automated process allowed further optimisations to occur and the agent became the subject of a cycle of
continuous enrichment. The result was a significant improvement to the banks automated mortgage
application approval process, a reduction in the number of assessors required to support the process, an
escalation of the skill level of the assessors, and a workflow that allowed self-diagnosis and selfimprovement. The solution illustrates the value of the anthropomorphic approach, in which a handful
of expert assessor roles were automated in a single agent.
2.4

Examples of Multi-agent Solutions in the Enterprise

Some classes of multi-agent solutions eventuate when a group of point-solution agents are effectively
combined to work together towards a goal of efficient workflow automation or supply chain
optimisation. Figure 3 illustrates a multi-agent solution to a retail distribution problem that has this
structure. Retail distribution presents a number of challenges and complexities including huge volumes

Agentis International 2005 Taylor, Evans-Greenwood, Odell

AGENTS IN THE ENTERPRISE

ASWEC 2005

of data produced by RFID readers, geographical distribution, scheduling, and libraries of interdependent logistics management and forecasting rules. The AdaptivEnterprise solution for this problem
was devised as three (anthropomorphic) agents, one each for the Store, Warehouse and Manufacturing
plant.

Warehouse

Continuous Supply

Continuous Supply

Manufacture

Keep Shelves Full

Fulfil Orders

Fulfil Orders

Keep Forecast
Accurate

Minimise Holdings

Maximise Batches

items
shelves
palettes

Readers placed on
shelves, forklifts,
order assembly
areas, loading bays
& trucks

palettes
orders
trucks

Readers placed on
production line,
forklifts, order
assembly areas,
loading bays & trucks

RF ID Servers

Continuous
stock-taking
& order
watching

Agent

Production Agent
Inventory Agent

Resourc e Planning

Orders

RF ID Servers

Continuous
stock-taking
& order
watching

Logistics

RF ID Servers

Order Management

Forec asting & Sales

Planning

Readers placed on
display shelves &
loading bays

Orders

Accurate Forecasting

Agent

Inventory Agent
Order Agent

Inventory
Management

Accurate Forecasting

Agent

Order Agent
Planning Agent

Inventory
Management

GOALS

Store

Continuous
stock-taking
& order
watching

materials
orders
palettes

F i g u r e 3 : A mu l t i - a g e n t s o l u t i o n t o a r e t a i l d i s t r i b u t i o n p r o b l e m.

The agent operating in the Store implements stock management and planning by observing the data
stream from the RFID tags on items and palettes and by considering forecasts sourced from the
warehouse. This agent applies continuous stock-tacking business rules and processes to pursue the
goals keep shelves full and keep forecast accurate. Its output included orders to the warehouse for
picking and fulfilment.
The Warehouse agent implements optimisation of warehouse stock holdings in the face of fluctuating
store demands and variable manufacturing runs. It uses data from RFID tags on palettes, orders and
trucks inventory management as input to goals fulfil orders and minimise holdings, which are
contradictory in nature are give rise to some ordering behaviours which are critical on the stability of
the entire supply chain.
At the Manufacturing facility, an agent implements production planning by monitoring the production
line, mobile machinery, and the movement of materials, as well as inventory and the plants scheduled
and actual operation, to create accurate forecasts back up the supply chain. This agent pursues goals
fulfil orders and maximise batches which conflict when an order must wait for a scheduled
production run.
This multi-agent solution integrated with existing legacy systems, consumed a high volume of RFID
data, supported secure communications, and allowed for the definition of diverse rules and plans. It
succeeded in reducing out-of-stocks without increasing supply chain volume, improved sales and
financial planning through feedback loops, and enabled continuous lights out operations.
The most interesting and challenging class of multi-agent applications arise from the types of
problems for which only a multi-agent solution is possible. Figure 4 illustrates one such multi-agent
solution to a complex work allocation problem within a workflow system. The overall aim of this
multi-agent solution was to automate a workflow for shipment tracking and tracing in a global logistics

Agentis International 2005 Taylor, Evans-Greenwood, Odell

AGENTS IN THE ENTERPRISE

ASWEC 2005

company. In different regional divisions in over 200 countries, the host organisations team leaders
used a gamut of formal and ad hoc practices to allocate, manage and track the progress of requests to
perform shipment tracking, repairs, inspections and customer call-backs for international shipments.
A solution to the global work allocation and management problem was devised that relied on
representing every system user as a node in a virtual hierarchical organisation structure, consisting of
Countries, Offices, Teams and end-Users. Each Office is allocated one or more Office Managers, and
each team one or more Team Supervisors. Users (as leaves) perform the work but could, under some
circumstances, re-allocate work elsewhere in the virtual organisation.

Workitem
Workitem

Country

Country

Office

Office

Office

Team

Team

User

User

Workload
Manager

Team

Team

Team
Manager

User

User

User

User

CSR

F i g u r e 4 : A mu l t i - a g e n t s o l u t i o n t o a g l o b a l w o r k a l l o c a t i o n p r o b l e m.

Agents were devised to anthropomorphise each node in the structure in the solution. When a new
workitem is created, it is passed to the creating Users Office agent, which then initiates a series of
interactions with its Teams to establish whether they have ability and availability to handle the new
piece of work (the red line in the figure). Availability is defined by a set of rules that determine
whether the agents current workload exceeds certain limits, which are in turn based upon some soft
parameters, rules and history. Ability is defined by the accumulation of the Teams Users capabilities
and preferences, which are again subject to some combinatorial rules of precedence. Each User has a
stateful agent that manages its session (which supports the logged-on Users interface and core
application behaviour), and this agent allows the Users Team Supervisor to change the Users
preferences for work dynamically.
If any agent representing a Team has ability and availability, the Offices agent performs the
allocation to the Team agent, which further delegates to the users agent. If two or more Team agents
respond, the Office agent applies tie-breaking rules. Although the actual solution implemented using
the Agentis AdaptivEnterprise product used synchronous calls between stateless agents to represent the
nodes in the virtual organisation, there are no theoretical or practical reasons why the solution could not
be extended to work with a dynamic community of agents which autonomously come and go from the
virtual organisation depending upon workload, the desire to attract or repel work, or other
considerations.

Agentis International 2005 Taylor, Evans-Greenwood, Odell

AGENTS IN THE ENTERPRISE

ASWEC 2005

Agentis Agent Technology Offering

The three agent-based solutions described have all been developed and deployed in enterprise
environments by Agentis using the AdaptivEnterprise suite of products. Agentis International was
founded in 2001 to commercialize the software assets of the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute
(AAII). Agentis product, the AdaptivEnterprise suite, employs the Belief-Desire-Intent model of
agency at its core and has direct lineage back to the Procedural Reasoning System, a BDI agent
platform jointly developed between Stanford Research Institute and NASA to support real-time fault
detection applications for the Space Shuttle program in the 1990s. Agentis has successfully deployed
agent-based solutions using its AdaptivEnterprise product in the financial services, insurance, retail and
distribution, logistics, and utility (energy) industries in the US, in Europe and Australia.
J2EE Cluster
App Server
App Server
App Server

Client

Web P roxy
or
H ardware Load
Balancer

Web
Container

EJB
Container

D atabase

Struts-based Servlet
Servlet s ession

Agent Instance
Agent Instance

Servlet s ession

Res ponses

Cus tom
Struts
Actions

D atabase

Agent Server

Servlet s ession

Reques ts

Replication

Common
Services

Agent Instance

Agent
API

RMI

Services

Plans

Cus tom
JSPs

Entity Bean

Session Bean

State

State

Facilities

Message Beans
Events

Security
Transaction
Logging
Monitoring &
Management

JMS
Web Service

Integration Facilities

JDBC

JMS

Web Srvc

EJB

API

JavaBean

Connection
Pooling

F i g u r e 5 : A g e n t i s A d a p t i v E n t e r p r i s e p r o d u c t r u n t i me a r c h i t e c t u r e .

Agentis AdaptivEnterprise achieves enterprise acceptability by supporting packaging and deployment

of its agents to industry-standard J2EE application servers. Agentis has invested significant applied
research and product development effort into producing and verifying the mapping between the kinds of
agent concepts outlined earlier and the standard J2EE mechanisms. Figure 5 provides a sketch of the
products runtime architecture.
Individual agents are deployed as stateless or stateful session beans, with or without beliefs (agent
data) that can be made to persist between invocations. Each agent bean includes a small runtime
component that manages that agents plan library, its perceptors (using JMS), its public interface, and
the runtime mechanism to select and schedule plans based on the selected goals, the state of the agents
beliefs, and the evaluation of preconditions. Agents may request services from other agents using
synchronous (RMI) or asynchronous (via JMS) requests. Agents may have explicit identity assigned to
them by the AdaptivEnterprise runtime services, or they may be anonymous, which allows pooling of
agents for high performance. Each individual agent may use an associated entity EJB for cached belief
persistence, and all agents are deployed with their own MDB for messaging support. Autonomy is
simulated using timers and schedulers, which may be used from an external source or from the

Agentis International 2005 Taylor, Evans-Greenwood, Odell

AGENTS IN THE ENTERPRISE

ASWEC 2005

application server. Each agent has access to the full range of application server services for
transactions, security, logging, and connection pooling, as well as to the industry standard interfaces,
including JMS, JDBC, JCA, JMX, the J2EE EJB API, and the JavaBean API.
The AdaptivEnterprise Suite extends agent concepts into the web server by providing tools and
templates to support the development of JSP-based user interfaces using the Struts MVC framework.
This support includes reference and sample JSPs, the ability to simulate agents using intelligent stubs,
and tools to automate and manage the JSP-to-agent interfaces during development.
Deployed agents are fully replicable across a J2EE cluster allowing failover and fail-back for high
availability operation. Warm or hot-deployment also allows operations staff to deploy a single agent, or
an agent component of a multi-agent solution, into the operational environment without having to halt
the application server or the entire application. Extensive performance profiling has been done across a
wide range of agent-based enterprise applications to demonstrate that the AdaptivEnterprise agents
perform similarly to hand-crafted Java EJB applications. The AdaptivEnterprise platform supports
some optimisation options in the inbuilt code generator.
At the time of writing, Agentis technology and product roadmap for AdaptivEnterprise includes IDE
and integrated product support for standards-based agent communication languages, a blackboard for
inter-agent communication and scheduling, flexible deployment of BDI agent models in a range of
runtime deployment containers, and many other enterprise integration and multi-agent features.

Conclusion

Agent technology promises much but is still considered to be some way from being mainstream. Its
further adoption is somewhat dependent upon its maturing into enterprise development environments,
standard interfaces, operational platforms, and high volume workloads and throughputs. None of these
inhibitors are insurmountable. Solving them involves bridging between the promising world of agents
and the uncompromising world of the enterprise. The Agentis AdaptivEnterprise product is one of
several examples in the marketplace of enterprise-ready agent development platforms.
There is much to like about what agent technology can bring to the enterprise. In particular, our
experience of developing agent-based applications for the enterprise highlights the way the paradigm
offers the solution architect a set of natural structures for designing enterprise solutions and
applications. From our experience, we reinforce anthropomorphism as a useful basis for decomposing
the next generation of complex, loosely coupled business systems. The description of three agent-based
solutions that primarily employ anthropomorphic agents, incrementally replacing human decisionmaking, in three different industries and problem spaces, illustrates a workable tactic.
Agentis approach is to promote the technology incrementally, starting with small, but highly visible
point-solutions that automate a particularly troublesome decision point in a high-value business process
that had not yielded to automation to date. These are tactical solutions to pressing workflow
problems. Beyond this, multi-agent solutions can be proposed, designed and delivered, using the same
anthropomorphic approach to system structuring, and the same iterative and incremental approach for
each agent point-solution. At each scale and stage of development, the multi-agent solution remains
highly adaptable.
Successfully designing and deploying agent-based solutions in the enterprise mixes this discipline and
freedom in a way that existing technologies have never fully allowed. Ultimately, it may be the
adaptability of agent-based solutions that propels them into enterprise space.

References

(AgentLink III, 2004) Agent Based Computing: Technology Roadmap and Consultation Report,
December 2004, AgentLink.
(Gartner 2004a) Hype Cycle for Application Integration and Platform Middleware, Gartner, 2004.
(Gartner 2004b) Hype Cycle for Application Development, Gartner, 2004.

Agentis International 2005 Taylor, Evans-Greenwood, Odell

AGENTS IN THE ENTERPRISE

ASWEC 2005

(Gartner 2004c) Hype Cycle for Human-Computer Interaction, Gartner, 2004.

(Gartner 2004d) Hype Cycle for B2B CRM Technologies, Gartner, 2004.
(Gartner 2004e) Hype Cycle for the Knowledge Workplace, Gartner, 2004.
(Gartner 2004f) Hype Cycle for Supply Chain Management, Gartner, 2004.

Agentis International 2005 Taylor, Evans-Greenwood, Odell

10