Designing Cooperating Agents for Office Automation

Office automation requires controlled coordination between information management and collaborative problem solving. Often, this entails the cooperation of agents executing diverse tasks in an office environment. Designing cooperating agents for office automation, however, is non-trivial: issues such as agent heterogeneity, communication protocols, context sensitivity, task coordination, and concurrency present considerable challenges. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a cooperating agent framework called GAME for office automation. More specifically, we focus on how GAME SetS up communication between its agents, and achieves cooperation by transferring tasks between its agents, whenever necessary, to avoid duplication of work by an agent.