Abstract

Not many computer science topics have enjoyed a similarly broad interest like autonomous software agents. In the last 20 years more than 180 platforms were created, intended to facilitate agent application creation. In recent years agent platform research seems to have lost much of its attractiveness.

This article is the second part of a three-part survey on agent platform technology. In this section we elaborate on standardization efforts for agent platforms and provide a selection of platforms which we consider as characteristic for each of the platform classes as introduced in the previous article.