B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

384 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
• Proactive — one that acts to achieve goals; and
• Able to perform directed tasks — one that takes directions from
human beings or other agents and performs the directed tasks.
13.3. What are Agent Systems?
Agent systems provide an environment for the execution of software
agents. As an application framework provides a set of services for the
execution of the application-related actions, an agent framework provides
a similar set of services for the execution of agent actions. Typically,
an agent framework would provide services, such as the ability to
communicate with other agents, maintain the current state of executing
agent and provide secure platform for code execution.
13.4. Agent Classification
Agents can be of the following types (see Figure 13.1):
Payment
Mobile
Seller
User
Interface
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Reactive
eliberative
Collabora itive 1
Figure 13.1. — Agent classification