Transactional Agents

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XVI

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2. Introduction

   Pages 1-4

3. Application Scenario

   Pages 5-19

4. Overview of Agent Technology

   Pages 21-39

5. Overview of Transaction Processing

   Pages 41-61

6. Proposed Approach: Transactional Agents

   Pages 63-78

7. The Agent Transaction Model

   Pages 79-115

8. Robustness Guaranteeing Mechanisms

   Pages 117-133

9. Interacting with the Execution Agent

   Pages 135-150

10. Simulation Study

    Pages 151-159

11. Simulation Results

    Pages 161-181

12. Summary and Future Work

    Pages 183-185

13. Back Matter

    Pages 187-205

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The term “agent” is one of those catchwords that mean widely differing things to different people. To telecommunications people it is little more than a mobile piece of code that may be executed at any place. At the other extreme, AI people often associate with agents human-like traits such as social behavior. In between, software people view agents as fairly self-contained pieces of software that, at the low end, pretty much act like objects and, at the high end, more or less auto- mously decide when and how to react to stimuli or proactively initiate effects that can be observed from their environment. Software agents are particularly important when it comes to distributed en- ronments. There, much of the communication takes place asynchronously, that is the sequence of events cannot be planned ahead in all detail. Instead, agents are given rules as to how to interpret the current situation and, given a common goal, so that they adjust their response accordingly.

• DOM
• Middleware
• Multi-agent system
• agents
• database
• information system
• knowledge

• Institute for Program Structures and Data Organization, University of Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany

  Khaled Nagi

Policies and ethics