SMART Agents

SMART Agents are a new form of software agent that interface with other agents forming an artificial intelligence system. The acronym "SMART" stands for "System for Managing Agents in Real Time". This is a bit of a misnomer because the agents manage themselves and each other by agreeing to become part of the collective whole. SMART Agents work together, within a SMART system, to perform smaller pieces of larger programming tasks so that the combined collective can achieve great things with relatively simple programming building blocks. The key concept of SMART is that each individual agent does not have to be "intelligent". By working together in a smart way, the agents form a type of emergent intelligence that may appear to exhibit intelligence.

Intelligent agents have been around for a long time in various forms. The term Intelligent Agent can refer to any agent that exhibits some amount of intelligence and there is no requirement that the agent have the ability to work with other agents. Therefore a SMART Agent is a specific type of Intelligent Agent where the emphasis is on how the agents communicate with each other rather than any one agent achieving a significant amount of intelligence. The system becomes the thing that can achieve intelligence using the relatively unintelligent building blocks.

Each SMART Agent can be programmed to achieve specific data processing functionality and can advertise that functionality to the SMART System, allowing other agents to work together to achieve things that each individual agent can not.

A SMART system can be built using any programming language and communication infrastructure.

Inspired by the popular 1960s TV show Get Smart, each agent can appear smarter by using other agents to accomplish various tasks. In the TV Series, Agent 86 played the leading agent and took all the credit, while Agent 99 did all of the real work. Agent 99 never even had a real name. She was always just referred to as "99".