The Hierarchical Agent Control Architecture (HAC) is a general toolkit for specifying an agent's behavior. HAC supports action abstraction, resource management, sensor integration, and is well suited to controlling large numbers of agents in dynamic environments. It relies on three hierarchies: action, sensor, and context. The action hierarchy controls the agent's behavior. It is organized arou...

Usability issues are traditionally associated with user interfaces rather than with agent frameworks. We argue that the models and metaphors used in a framework will affect the thinking of the developer and influence the application design. Therefore, usability is of central importance for successful software development and for reducing development and maintenance costs. We discuss the design ...

Negotiation is a central process in an agent society where autonomous agents have to cooperate in order to resolve conflicting interests and yet compete to divide limited resources. A direct dialogical exchange of information between agents usually leads to competitive forms of negotiation where the most powerful agents win. Alternatively, an intelligent mediated interaction may better achieve ...

This paper presents a framework for mobile agents. The framework is unique among other mobile agent systems in structuring mobile agents hierarchically. The framework provides the notion of agent hierarchy, in which each mobile agent can be a container of other mobile agents. We construct a prototype implementation of this framework. It is built on the Java language and mobile agents are given ...

In knowledge-based economy, knowledge has a public good and non-rivalry nature. Firms build their own knowledge stock not only by means of internal R&D and collaboration with partners, but also by means of previously spilled over knowledge of other firms and public research laboratories (such as universities). Firms based on their absorptive capacity, and level of intra-industry and extra-indus...