Software agents in java

Consider the below code snippet representing the agent,. Note that the very purpose of having agent is to provide instrumentation capabilities to the application — i. The method premain is passed with Instrumentation object that serves its very purpose. Using Instrumentation object it is possible to adding transformer objects. Transformer object does the real job of transforming or re-defining the content of class files at run-time.

The above code defines a transformer object, whose declaration is given below,. ClassFileTransformer; import java. IllegalClassFormatException; import java.

Note that, a transformer object must implement the ClassFileTransformer interface and the abstract method transform needs to be overridden. This method will be called for every class that is loaded as part of the application.

Note that the content of the class can be represented as byte array and this method can re-define the class content that returnss a different byte array as denoted by the method signature.

For simplicity, this method returns the original class byte array that is passed to it. Given above is the content of the manifest file for the agent. Note that for testing the agent, we need a sample application file which is given below.

To illustrate the behavior of class loading, the application creates instances for Test classes. Test1 61de33net. An agent observes its environment through sensors. Actuators: Actuators are the component of machines that converts energy into motion.

The actuators are only responsible for moving and controlling a system. An actuator can be an electric motor, gears, rails, etc. Effectors: Effectors are the devices which affect the environment. Effectors can be legs, wheels, arms, fingers, wings, fins, and display screen.

An intelligent agent is an autonomous entity which act upon an environment using sensors and actuators for achieving goals. An intelligent agent may learn from the environment to achieve their goals. A thermostat is an example of an intelligent agent. A rational agent is an agent which has clear preference, models uncertainty, and acts in a way to maximize its performance measure with all possible actions.

A rational agent is said to perform the right things. AI is about creating rational agents to use for game theory and decision theory for various real-world scenarios.

For an AI agent, the rational action is most important because in AI reinforcement learning algorithm, for each best possible action, agent gets the positive reward and for each wrong action, an agent gets a negative reward. The rationality of an agent is measured by its performance measure. Rationality can be judged on the basis of following points:. The task of AI is to design an agent program which implements the agent function. The structure of an intelligent agent is a combination of architecture and agent program.

It can be viewed as:. Agent program: Agent program is an implementation of agent function. An agent program executes on the physical architecture to produce function f. It is made up of four words:.

JavaTpoint offers too many high quality services. An agent is simply another kind of software abstraction, an abstraction in the same way that methods, functions, and objects are software abstractions. An object is a high-level abstraction that describes methods and attributes of a software component.

An agent, however, is an extremely high-level software abstraction which provides a convenient and powerful way to describe a complex software entity. Rather than being defined in terms of methods and attributes, an agent is defined in terms of its behavior.

This is important because programming an agent-based system is primarily a matter of specifying agent behavior instead of identifying classes, methods and attributes. It is much easier and more natural to specify behavior than to write code. There is a minimum set of common features that typify a software agent.

A software agent is autonomous; the agent is capable of operating as a standalone process and performing actions without user intervention. A software agent is communicative; it communicates with the user, other software agents, or other software processes.

A software agent is perceptive; it is able to perceive and respond to changes in its environment. Software agents, like people, can possess different levels of competence at performing a particular task.

For example, one email software agent might be quite dumb and capable of only forwarding email to a few specified locations. A second, smarter email agent might have the ability to automatically detect and delete spam. While software agents must be autonomous, communicative, and perceptive, they can have different levels of competence intelligence as determined by their programs - i.

What is an Agency? Software agents, like people, can be most useful when they work with other software agents in performing a task. A collection of software agents that communicate and cooperate with each other is called an agency. System designers using agents must consider the capabilities of each individual agent and how multiple agents can work together.

The agent-based approach allows the system designer to implement the system using multiple agents, with each agent specialized for a particular task. For example, an electronic commerce application might have buyer agents, seller agents, stocking agents, database agents, email agents, etc.

All of these agents need to communicate with each other and must have the capability of working together to achieve a common set of goals. Why are Agents important? Software developers and system designers use high-level abstractions in building complex software for one reason - to manage complexity.

An abstraction focuses on the important and essential properties of a problem and hides the incidental components of that problem. Agents provide a new way of managing complexity because they provide a new way of describing a complex system or process.

The possibilities are endless. Aspect-Oriented Programming? Mutation testing? You name it. What are these things, and how do they relate to instrumentation? In short, a Java agent is nothing more than a normal Java class. The difference is that it has to follow some specific conventions. The first convention has to do with the entry point for the agent. As soon as the JVM initializes, it calls the premain method of every agent.

After that, it calls the main method of the Java application as usual. Every premain method has to resume execution normally for the application to proceed to the startup phase. A java agent, in practice, is a special type of. The first ingredient we need to create our agent is the agent class. Copy the following content and paste on your main class:.

The application is super simple. It starts asking the user for the number of items they wish to print.