30 April 2001/Vol. 44, No. 4 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM

TELEC

The vision of the telecommunica-tions market today is “informa-tion at any time, at any place, inany form.” Within this open mar-ket of information services, the

aspects of service customization and instant serviceprovision are of fundamental importance. Moreover,the provision of telecommunications services will bea key component in future business successes. In thiscontext the new paradigm of agent-oriented pro-gramming is gaining momentum.The main actors in this scenario areagents, which are very suitable toaddress a lot of the problems related tothe diversity of access devices, the lim-itedness of current procedures, thecomplexity of inherently distributedproblems, and the open market ingeneral.

The world of telecommunications is changing at arapid pace, and these changes are taking place in thetechnological as well as in the regulatory arenas. Soft-ware companies are entering the market offering theirproducts as service solutions. Additionally, marketforces are at work on an unprecedented scale. Giventhese circumstances, it will no longer be sufficient forprivate network operators to solely provide the net-work infrastructure, instead the challenge is to evolveto full-service providers. This implies the increasinglycomplex telecommunications infrastructure needs tobe managed more efficiently while, conversely, newtypes of telecommunications services need to be

developed and provided. It is in particular such futureservices that need to satisfy a broad range of require-ments, including personalization, support for usermobility, on-demand combination of different ser-vices, and both online and offline service usage.

It is useful to distinguish basic telecommunicationsapplications from telematics services. By the notion ofa telecommunications application we generallydenote any kind of information system necessary torun, to manage, and to administrate computer net-

works. Additionally, all facilities in thearea of internal administration withina telecommunication or networkprovider—customer service systems,for example—will be subsumed by thenotion of telecommunications appli-cations. On the contrary, the notion ofa telematics service emphasizes the

mostly external information service aspect. Thisincludes the fact that the customer of telematics ser-vices has to pay for them. That is, the service mustrepresent an appropriate equivalent value, transparentaccounting models must be invented, and the specificroles of vendor and customer have to be modeled bythe system, especially with respect to the generallyexpected rights and duties that come along with theseroles.

Future telematics services will have to meet a num-ber of requirements resulting from rapidly changingmarkets and technologies. These requirementsinclude service personalization, support for usermobility and network convergence, on-demand ser-

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32 April 2001/Vol. 44, No. 4 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM

vice integration and combination, security, manage-ability, transparency, robustness, and delegation. Thislist is not comprehensive; depending on the type andlevel of detail of user requirements on specific services,it might be arbitrarily extended.

The basic notion of the domain of software agents isthe agent itself. This is a piece of software that acts onbehalf of a user or assists a user. More specifically, anagent is a self-contained software element responsiblefor performing part of a programmatic process. Theexact definition of an “agent” is still under discussion,and varies from author to author. One way agentsmight be used as a structural element of systems design,commonly called Agent-Oriented Techniques (AOT),is shown in the article “An Agent-based Approach forBuilding Complex Software Systems.”

In order to be applicable for telecommunicationsapplications and service provisioning agents musthave certain specific capabilities, especially in the areasof agent management, security, personalization, andmobility. Further, different basic types of agents canbe identified: manager agents for administration ofthe runtime platform, stationary agents as serviceproviders, and mobile agents for mobility support andservice provisioning. For efficient development anddeployment of agent-based systems it is helpful to uti-lize toolkits. An example of a toolkit that has beenspecifically designed for the telecommunicationsdomain is described in “Agent-based Telematic Ser-vices and Telecom Applications.”

There are a number of telecommunications scenar-ios that are suitable candidates to be realized usingagent technologies. Telecommunications providershave been changing from voice carriers to suppliers ofdifferentiated services and need to leverage their exist-ing network infrastructure to manage it more effi-ciently and enhance it for service provisioning oftoday’s and future services. The new services have tobe quickly created, combinable from basic services tohigh-value services, reliably provided, and efficientlyadministered. Customers want to use personalizedvalue-added services, thus these services are expectedto be dynamically adaptable to customers’ needs: theymust satisfy increasing requirements in quality of ser-vice, availability, and personalization. Decentralizingnetwork management activities using AOT can bevery effective, due to the characteristics of mobility,cooperation, and autonomy of the agents in distrib-uted management applications. AOT is an approachto fulfill the prerequisites of active nodes and mobileprogram code in active networking. It is expected thatAOT will lead to new frontiers in the areas of intelli-gent networks and active network management. Thearticles “Community-based Service Location” and

“Service Creation and Management in Active Tele-com Networks” are set in this scenario.

Driven by the current growth of networking capa-bilities and network infrastructures for computer sys-tems, both in business and private domains, businesscontracts and transactions mediated by means of elec-tronic communications become more and moreviable. This trend has been mainly influenced by theadvent and success of the Internet. Corresponding tothe distinction between business and private cus-tomers, the e-commerce market differentiates busi-ness-to-business and consumer markets. Morespecifically, the notion of e-commerce is often used todenote that particular part of the consumer market inwhich private customers use the Web to supply them-selves with goods or services ordered online. The arti-cles “Communication Management Experiences inE-Commerce” and “Agent-Oriented Technology inSupport of E-Business” shed more light on the areaof agent-supported e-commerce.

Another promising area for agent technology is theintelligent home, enabled by intelligent devices beingenhanced with software technologies such as Jini fornetworked control and actuation. Current drawbacksof insufficient communication infrastructure will beresolved with the advent of wireless communicationtechnologies like Bluetooth and the deployment ofthe Internet Protocol Version 6 for a sufficient rangeof addresses. Applications in this context allow for amore flexible management and use of the home-basedequipment. In the future this area will grow togetherwith the aforementioned e-business. Because of theheterogenous and decentralized structure of this areathe utilization of agent technologies promises to beeffective.

Scenarios from the area of mobility supporting ser-vices are characterized by asynchronous communica-tions and the need for highest efficiency. Servicesmust be personalizable and independent from time,place, and the access devices or operating systems thatare used. Of special interest in this domain is the abil-

Figure 1. Architecture of an agent-based traffic telematics scenario.

ity of the service-providing agents to keep track oftheir cost-effective activities—necessary for a reliableaccounting of the called-on services—and to guaran-tee a high standard of security restrictions, goingbeyond the infrastructure properties of currentlyavailable platforms, such as authorization, authentica-tion, or contracting.

Traffic telematics is a prominent representative inthe area of mobility supporting services. In a traffictelematics scenario, several intelligent and personal-ized services are supplied and integrated to be usedfrom within a car. Typical services comprise dynamicrouting in consideration of traffic-related informa-tion, location-based services informing the driverabout nearby sightseeing locations or shopping facili-ties, monitoring of the fuel level in combination withinformation about nearby fuel stations, diagnosis ofmachine failures combined with notification of abreakdown service, and emergency call in the case ofan accident. An agent-based solution would providedifferent agents for the particular tasks, for example,content provider agents for accessing and bundlingdistributed information sources, service provideragents for service provisioning, as well as mobile useragents for requesting and using services. In order toprovide only useful information to the driver all ser-vices should be personalizable by using profile data.

An agent-based realization would lead to a systemarchitecture as illustrated in Figure 1. Informationservices may be installed on a traffic telematics portalor located elsewhere on the Internet. Several kinds ofagents are used for enriching the raw data of theaccompanied information sources into value-added,personalized services. The article “Agent-OrientedTechnology in Support of E-Business” describes atypology of different agent types in a business setting.

In the example traffic telematics scenario, a run-time environment for agents is installed in the car’son-board computer. This infrastructure enables soft-ware agents to run safely and to communicate witheach other, and provides access to the periphery. Spe-cialized agents collaboratively monitor and diagnosethe operations and activities of the car equipment anddisplay status messages. Most of the work is done inthe background without requiring driver interven-tion. The autonomy property allows an agent to reactflexibly according to a given situation. For example, incase of a malfunction the agent will not just notify thedriver but additionally try to solve the problem incooperation with other agents or seek assistance.

Other services also act in a push-like manner, evenif they are initiated by the driver (see Figure 2). Forinstance, a traveler wanting to obtain informationabout places of interest would initiate this service

from within the car. Consequently a mobile agent willbe instructed to fulfill its principal’s requirements.The agent would then move to a location where sucha sightseeing service is offered by carrying the driver’sroute plan and personal interests with the agent, andthen deliver all relevant data to a service-provideragent and authorize it to start working. During theservice usage the car will regularly send its GPS coor-dinates to the mobile agent, accessing and filtering thesuggestions of the service provider agent according tothe traveler’s interest profile. As a consequence, themobile agent will communicate the appropriateresults back to the car where they are presented to thedriver.

We begin our journey into the promising world ofsoftware agents with the articles presented here, andwill monitor the horizon for more applicationsappearing down the road.

Sahin Albayrak (sahin@cs.tu-berlin.de) is the founder and scientific head of the DAI-Laboratory at the Technical University of Berlin.

© 2001 ACM 0002-0782/01/0400 $5.00

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Figure 2. Graphical user interfaces for the car computer.