Toward Agent-Based Software Engineering for Information-Dependent Enterprise Applications

Established enterprises continue to create new applications and systems without removing older ones. Legacy systems are often necessary to the new applications, but inadequate for the new environment, which can be large and widely distributed. This paper presents two applications—kiosks for telephone sales and support, and information access for service technicians—that are representative of a large class of distributed, information-dependent applications. This class is characterized by geographical distribution, organizational dispersion, and broad implementational heterogeneity, which together form a technology barrier that hinders rapid system adaptation. The approach described in this paper addresses the distribution and heterogeneity common to this class of applications by creating an applicationindependent software agent kernel, and then deploying that kernel in various specific applications according to a practical and incremental strategy.