In the last decade, Activity Theory has been discussed a lot in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Activity Theory was used both theoretically as an analytical method and practically as a development framework for Information Systems. Meanwhile, there is a new trench from Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence researchers find that the fru...

Agent technology gives many promises for future IT-systems, but providing security and privacy in particular is a difficult challenge. This paper addresses the privacy problems in agent technology and provides several solutions to overcome some of these problems. It is shown that if an encryption algorithm is used in a different form it can also provide privacy in communication for agents. Seco...

In this paper we propose a multi-agent technology based on a timed concurrent constraint programming. The technology allows to use constraints to specify interactive, reactive, dynamic and intelligent behavior of agents. Practical value of the. technology is confirmed by its implementation i the agent-based language TAO-Kit for development of graphics applications. Some features of this languag...

Although there is still no killer application identified for Mobile and Intelligent Agents, today Agent technology is considered to form an important part of flexible middleware platforms. A main issue in this context is the integration of Mobile and Intelligent Agent Technology, as well as Distributed Object Technology, e.g., the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). This is parti...

Mobile agent technology has become a new paradigm for distributed real-time systems because of their inherent advantages. In any distributed system, along with other issues, survivability and fault tolerance are vital issues for deploying mobile-agent systems. E-business becoming a prominent domain for deploying agent technology, it also faces reliability problems due to the failure of agent pl...

The community of agent researchers and engineers has produced a number of interesting and mature results. However, agent technology is still not widely adopted by industrial software developers or software companies. Yet, given that the software paradigms which are currently employed by the software industry, such as service-oriented architectures or cloud computing, have much in common with ag...

Agent technology has been recognized as a promising paradigm for next generation manufacturing systems. Researchers have attempted to apply agent technology to manufacturing enterprise integration, enterprise collaboration (including supply chain management and virtual enterprises), manufacturing process planning and scheduling, shop floor control, and to holonic manufacturing as an implementat...

The interactive Web seems a natural place for the use of agent technology, to bring access to e-services with solutions to dynamic, open and changing environments. However, agent technology is still quite low key in this expanding area of Internet access and e-business space. Part of the reason for this has been the lack of a large-scale test-bed. Some fundamental changes in the development of ...

Information technology support for complex, dynamic, and distributed business processes as they occur in engineering domains requires an advanced process management system which enhances currently available workflow management services with respect to integration, flexibility, and adaptation. We present an uniform and flexible framework for advanced process management on an abstract level which...

The development of high quality software is considered to be extremely di cult. In fact, it has been argued that such endeavours are one of the most di cult construction tasks that humans undertake [2]. Contemporary IT-infrastructures facilitate the need for distributed applications—a system design which can be implemented with Agent Oriented Software Engineering [2]. Yet, despite the requireme...