Intelligent Agents Technologies
                     SABRE Decisions Technologies
                     (a part of AMR Corporation)
                           Fort Worth, TX.

                            Brian Ebersold
                             Chuck Geiger

Abstract:

At Sabre Decision Technologies we have been looking at the use of
Intelligent Agents Technologies in the context of the Internet for
about a year now. Doug Gray, the Director of software development for
our direct distribution products group had read some article on soft
bots and Internet agents and put together a proposal to our senior
management that we be allowed to pursue some activity in this
area. Doug knew we had a good experience base to draw upon within SDT
from individuals that had built a number of intelligent decision
support systems for American Airlines. These systems included
autonomous expert systems, routing and planning systems, and expert
decision systems.

We have successfully built and demonstrated a prototype that
demonstrates simple agent technology (client-server) for assisting a
traveler in finding the lowest cost options for travel. We have also
demonstrated constraint based search of travel options based on user
preferences, allowing the user to identify when and how much he/she is
willing to spend, and based on their personal profile, the prototype
recommends flights and associated activities for the customer.

While the product that has been built is basically an interactive
utility we see the need for applications to become more autonomous and
transportable to better suit the users needs, for example: if a user
wants, they will be able to set up a watchdog to monitor the prices of
flight for a specific market (e.g London for $300) they will in
essence spawn an application to the pricing server, then if the price
on the London flight falls beneath the limit set by the customer the
child application will contact an application on an e-mail server to
trigger an e-mail to the customer alerting them of the opportunity.
Once the child watchdog has performed it?s function or exceeded it?s
allowable time limit it will expire. This software approach
complements the distributed systems architecture we are currently
building at SDT.

Applications
Current:
 We have a few applications under development , these include:
 flight finder plus
        a real-time heuristic based client server low cost travel finder
 tripsearch
        a real-time or autonomous algorithmic based low cost travel finder
 travel genie
        an interactive hi-bred heuristic, filter, that user autonomous agents
        to search web

Future:
        Watch dogs
        autonomous monitor that auto e-mail
        collaborative filters
        distributed agents that share work load and have dialogue to solve
        problems