Engineering e-Collaboration Services with a Multi-Agent System Approach

  • Authors:

  • Dickson K.W. Chiu;S.C. Cheung;Ho-fung Leung;Patrick C.K. Hung;Eleanna Kafeza;Hua Hu;Minhong Wang;Haiyang Hu;Yi Zhuang

  • Affiliations:

  • Dickson Computer Systems, Hong Kong;The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong;The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong;University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada;Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece;Hangzhou Dianzi University, China;The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong;Zhejiang Gongshang University, China;Zhejiang Gongshang University, China

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Systems and Service-Oriented Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

With recent advances in mobile technologies and e-commerce infrastructures, there have been increasing demands for the expansion of collaboration services within and across systems. In particular, human collaboration requirements should be considered together with those for systems and their components. Agent technologies have been deployed in order to model and implement e-commerce activities as multi-agent systems MAS. Agents are able to provide assistance on behalf of their users or systems in collaboration services. As such, we advocate the engineering of e-collaboration support by means of MAS in the following three key dimensions: i across multiple platforms, ii across organization boundaries, and iii agent-based intelligent support. To archive this, we present a MAS infrastructure to facilitate systems and human collaboration or e-collaboration activities based on the belief-desire-intension BDI agent architecture, constraint technology, and contemporary Web Services. Further, the MAS infrastructure also provides users with different options of agent support on different platforms. Motivated by the requirements of mobile professional workforces in large enterprises, the authors present their development and adaptation methodology for e-collaboration services with a case study of constraint-based collaboration protocol from a three-tier implementation architecture aspect. They evaluate our approach from the perspective of three main stakeholders of e-collaboration, which include users, management, and systems developers.