The Study of Fundamental Concepts of Agent and Multi-agent Systems

The concept of n intelligent agent is a concept that is born from the area of artificial intelligence; in fact, a commonly-accepted definition relates the discipline of artificial intelligence with the analysis and design of autonomous entities capable of exhibitin intelligent behavior. From that perspective, it is assumed that an intelligent agent must be able to perceive its environment, reason about how to achieve its objectives, act towards achieving them through the application of some principle of rationality, and interact with other intelligent agents, being artificial or human [1]. Multi-agent systems are a particular case of a distributed system, and its particularity lies in the fact that the components of the system are autonomous and selfish, seeking to satisfy their own objectives. In addition, these systems also stand out for being open systems without a centralized design [2]. One main reason for the great interest and attention that multi-agent systems have received is that they are seen as an enabling technology for complex applications that require distributed and parallel processing of data and operate autonomously in complex and dynamic domains.