An agent is an autonomous decision-making entity that receives sensor information from an environment and acts based on that information. Agents may be humans or computer software, and may include hardware elements (e.g., robots). In agent-based simulation, agents interact within the environment to generate system behavior; and in artificial intelligence, the behavior of an agent is generally directed towards achieving certain goals.
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References
Macal, C. M., & North, M. J. (2011). Introductory tutorial: Agent-based modeling and simulation. In S. Jain, R. R. Creasey, J. Himmelspach, K. P. White, & M. Fu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2011 winter simulation conference (pp. 1456–1469).
Russell, S., & Norvig, P. (2010). Artificial intelligence: A modern approach (3rd ed.). New York: Prentice Hall.
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(2013). Agent. In: Gass, S.I., Fu, M.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1153-7_201006
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