Introduction

The computational environment which is emerging in such programs as the National Information Infrastructure (NII) is characterized by being highly distributed, heterogeneous, extremely dynamic, and comprising a large number of autonomous nodes. An information system operating in such an environment must handle several emerging problems:

The predominant architecture on the Internet, the cli model, is too restrictive. It is difficult for current Internet information services to take the initiative in bringing new, critical material to a user's attention. Some nodes will want to act as both clients and servers, depending upon with whom they are interacting.
Several forms of heterogeneity need to be handled, e.g. different platforms, different data formats, the capabilities of different information services, and the different standards (CORBA, OLE, LINDA, ISIS, ZIRCON, OpenDoc, etc.) used by those services.
Many software technologies such as event simulation, applied natural language processing, knowledge--based reasoning, advanced information retrieval, speech processing, etc. have matured to the point of being ready to participate in and contribute to an NII environment. However, there is a lack of tools and techniques for constructing intelligent clients and servers or for building agent--based software in general.

A community of intelligent agents can address the first two of the problems mentioned above. When we describe agents as intelligent, we refer to their ability to: communicate with each other using an expressive communication language; work together cooperatively to accomplish complex goals; act on their own initiative; and use local information and knowledge to manage local resources and handle requests from peer agents.

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