An Agent-based Telecooperation Framework
Albrecht Schmidt, Alexander Specker, Gerhard Partsch, Michael Weber, Siegfried Hoeck
Department for Distributed Systems
University of Ulm, Germany
aschmidt@hydra.informatik.uni-ulm.de, aspecker@hydra.informatik.uni-ulm.de,
gpartsch@informatik.uni-ulm.de, weber@informatik.uni-ulm.de,hoeck@informatik.uni-ulm.de
Abstract.
As the amount of information and communication increases dramatically
new working environments must provide efficient mechanisms to
maximize the benefits of these developments. In this paper a telecollaboration
environment based on agent technology is proposed, which could be used as an
information infrastructure for cooperative buildings or virtual enterprises.
The number of communication and information services increases rapidly in
number and complexity. Therefore mediating components between users and
services are required. In the environment being described it is suggested to de-
ploy a personalized agent cluster for each user and network wide directory, bro-
ker, and trading services.
The agent cluster acts as a surrogate for the user in the system. In each cluster a
variable set of personalized agents is aggregated according to the requirements
of the user. Exemplarily the architecture and functionality of a communication
agent as one part of an agent cluster is described.
Keywords. telecooperation, Internet, agent technology, personalized agents,
computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), multimedia, communication,
broker, trader
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