Humanization of Soft Computing Agents

Soft computing agents today are being applied in a range of areas including image processing, engineering, process control, data mining, internet and others. In the process of applying soft computing agents to complex real world problems three phenomena have emerged. Firstly, the application of soft computing agents in distributed environments has resulted in merger of techniques from soft computing area with those in distributed artificial intelligence. Secondly, in order to facilitate better understanding and frequent use of the soft computing agent technology, humanization of these agents has become an important design issue (Takagi, 2001). Thirdly, given the approximate and imprecise nature of the solutions provided by soft computing agents, optimization has become an important design issue in an effort to improve the quality of solution provided by soft computing agents. Finally, from a user’s perspective, as the soft computing agent technologies have moved out of laboratories into the internet and the real world the need to model and express these technologies in the problem solving context of user. In this chapter we model these four phenomenons as part of multi-layered multi-agent architecture. The layered architec­ture is also motivated by the human-centered approach and criteria outlined in the 1997 NSF workshop on human-centered systems.