Agents, Brokers, Traders, and Services in Cooperative Systems

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 telecooperation environment based on agent technology is proposed, which can be used as an information and collaboration infrastructure for virtual enterprises and other cooperative environments. The availability of such an infrastructure is vital for cooperative processes. Collaboration, communication and information services increase rapidly in number and complexity. Therefore mediating components between users and services are required. In the framework described in this paper it is suggested to deploy a personalized agent cluster for each user and network wide directory, broker, and trading services. The agent cluster acts as a surrogate and digital representation of the user in the system. The cluster provides the functionality of a personal assistant that resides in the network. To achieve this each cluster consists of a variable set of personalized software agents that are aggregated according to the requirements of the user. As an example the communication agent as one part of an agent cluster is described in detail.