Measuring the Pro-Activity of Software Agents

Abstract

Abstract-Despite having well-defined characteristics, software agents do not have a developed set of measures defining their quality. Attempts at evaluating software agent quality have focused on some agent aspects, like the development process, whereas others focusing on the agent as a software product have basically adopted measures associated with other software paradigms, like procedural and object-oriented concepts. Here we propose a set of measures for evaluating software agent pro-activity, the software agent's goal-driven behavioral ability to take the initiative and satisfy its goals.

Quality Measures for Agent-Oriented Software

“…The importance of autonomy lies in the fact that in order to achieve an objective the agent must have the possibility to decide, not only how to achieve an objective, but also that the objectives must be sought on the basis of an interest generated endogenously [12], must control their internal state, have independence and the ability to adapt to the needs of their environment [10].…”

“…Proactivity refers to the ability of agents to achieve their goals. To do this, it must make decisions dynamically (initiative), have the ability to relate to obtain information that helps solve problems (interaction) and must act actively in response to environmental stimuli (reaction) [10].…”

“…In this chapter, we present the study of the characteristics of social ability, autonomy and proactivity, with their attributes and associated measures, considering that they are the most representative of the software agent [8][9][10]. The objective of this research work is to propose attributes associated with these characteristics of the software agent and a set of measures that allow evaluating these attributes [11].…”

Measures for Testing the Reactivity Property of a Software Agent

“…Evolution capability attributes can be measured using the following measures  State Update Capacity  Frequency of state Update D. Measuring Pro-activity of an agent [8] Agent pro-activity considers three important attributes such as initiative, interaction and reaction.…”

“…Measuring software quality of an agent depends upon the ability to describe the agent characteristics such as autonomy, reactivity, proactiveness and collaboration. A set of measures for evaluating the software agent's autonomy [6] [9], pro-activity [7], socialability [8] [9], has been dealt in the literature. In this paper, a set of measures for evaluating the software agent's reactivity property, considering its associated attributes has been proposed.…”