A Multi-agent Reflective Architecture for User Assistance and Its Application to E-commerce

  • Authors:

  • Antonella Di Stefano;Giuseppe Pappalardo;Corrado Santoro;Emiliano Tramontana

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • CIA '02 Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents VI
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Assisting an user working with an application can involve several tasks of a different nature; thus it can be a complex job which is better performed by several autonomous agents. Accordingly, in many scenarios, several small assistant agents, each dedicated to a single task, are employed to supply help and to enhance the same application.This paper proposes a software architecture that allows multiple assistants to serve the same application and interact with each other as necessary, while working autonomously from each other. This architecture interfaces assistants with an existing application by means of computational reflection. The latter mechanism allows meaningful user activities to be intercepted by assistants, and the outcomes of their activity to be supplied to the application. No assumptions need to be made about the application or the assistants; assistants can be changed, added and removed as necessary to adapt the application to unforeseen scenarios, conversely an assistant can be employed to support several applications. The usefulness and applicability of the proposed architecture is demonstrated by an e-commerce case study: we show how a suitable assistant set can integrate with and enhance a bare web browser, making it fit to support e-commerce activities.