Intelligent Agents - A New Technology for Future Distributed Sensor Systems?

This master thesis deals with intelligent agents and the possibility to use the intelligent agent technology in future distributed sensor systems. The term future distributed sensor system refers to a system based on several sensors that will be developed within a period of five to ten years. Since researchers have not agreed on a more precise definition of intelligent agents, we first examined what constitutes an intelligent agent and made a definition suited for our application domain. We used our definition as a base for investigating if and how intelligent agents can be used in future distributed sensor systems. We argue that it is not interesting to come up with a general agent definition applicable to every agent, instead one should make a foundation for a definition. When this is done we can decide on more specific features depending on the task the agent will perform and in what domain the agent will work in. Finally we conclude that it is possible to use the agent technology in sensor systems and present four different agent types applicable to future distributed sensor systems. Supervisors: Staffan Björk, The Viktoria Institute Torbjörn Andreasson, Ericsson Microwave Systems AB