Patrik Mihailescu

Realizing Teamwork in the Field: An Agent-Based Approach

The managerial trend of empowering workforces requires mobile workers to rely on a high degree of teamwork in a changing environment. An intelligent agent enhances the provision of cooperative services by adopting a component-based approach, increasing accessibility to mobile workers in the field.

A Conversational Component-Based Open Multi-agent Architecture for Flexible Information Trading

In a competitive market environment, information service providers try to differentiate their offerings by adopting new kinds of interactions with information consumers. The standardization of languages and interaction protocols used in messages among information agents in electronic commerce frustrates the needs of service providers as they attempt to differentiate their offerings. In this paper a multi-agent architecture (where conversational components are used as the main tool for interactions among participating agents) is proposed to allow an information consumer agent to interact with an information provider agent that supplies a service via an unknown language or interaction protocol.

MAS platforms as an enabler of enterprise mobilisation: the state of the art

One of the main application areas for multi-agent systems technology is enterprise mobilization, wherein the main business process actors are nomadic workers. An agents autonomy, sociality and intelligence are highly prized features when it comes to supporting those mobile workers who are geographically isolated from the main knowledge source (i.e. the corporate Intranet) and are frequently moving from one location to another. Based on experience gained from two field trials of applications (built using for multi-agent systems technology and running on lightweight handheld devices) that support mobile business processes for telecommunications service provisioning and maintenance, this paper proposes desirable metrics for any multi-agent systems platform intended for enterprise mobilisation use. These metrics are then used to compare a number of existing multi-agent systems platforms, and based on the results, this paper identifies some areas for improvement.

TeamWorker: An Agent-Based Support System for Mobile Task Execution

An organization’s mobile workforce is a vital asset, as it is in the front line liaising with customers, and driving the sale of an organization’s products and/or services. Despite this, the IT support provided to mobile workers is often inferior to that available to office-based workers. Mobile workers operate in an unreliable environment, and as such require differing types of support. Within this paper we present a multi-agent based computer cooperative support system known as TeamWorker which can help overcome the difficulties faced by mobile workers. Within this system, each mobile worker is assigned a personal agent that can assist her/him during the working day through appropriate service provision (based on current work context), and through monitoring work progress to anticipate and undertake required actions on the user’s behalf. A detailed presentation of the TeamWorker system is given, including the benefits provided for a real life mobile business process.

Multi-agent Technology as an enabler of Computer Supported Cooperative Work for the Mobile Workforce

This paper proposes an agent-based computer supported cooperative work system known as TeamWorker that enables cooperation between mobile workers for the execution of their jobs by providing services via conversational components (C-COMs). C-COMs, encapsulate agent interaction protocols, which can be dynamically plugged into participating agents. Furthermore, the intelligence and autonomy of agent technology is applied to overcome the barriers faced in mobile computing environments, such as difficulty in monitoring work progress, device diversity, need for multi-modal human agent interface, etc. Finally, we discuss how TeamWorker has been applied to a real mobile business process in a telecommunications company in the UK.