Towards a hierarchical taxonomy of autonomous agents

Predrag T. Tosic, Gul A. Agha

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Autonomous agents have become an influential and powerful paradigm in a great variety of disciplines, from sociology and economics to distributed artificial intelligence and software engineering to philosophy. Given that the paradigm has been around for awhile, one would expect a broadly agreed-upon, solid understanding of what autonomous agents are and what they are not. This, however, is not the case. We therefore join the ongoing debate on what are the appropriate notions of autonomous agency. We approach agents and agent ontology from a cybernetics and general systems perspective, in contrast to the much more common in the agent literature sociology, anthropology and/or cognitive psychology based approaches. We attempt to identify the most fundamental attributes of autonomous agents, and propose a tentative hierarchy of autonomous agents based on those attributes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2004 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, SMC 2004
Pages3421-3426
Number of pages6
DOIs
StatePublished - 2004
Event2004 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, SMC 2004 - The Hague, Netherlands
Duration: Oct 10 2004Oct 13 2004

Publication series

NameConference Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics
Volume4
ISSN (Print)1062-922X

Other

Other2004 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, SMC 2004
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityThe Hague
Period10/10/0410/13/04

Keywords

  • Intelligent Systems
  • Intelligent and Soft Computing - Systems and Applications
  • Smart Agents

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Engineering

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