We explore factors associated with employees ability to cope with the challenges of telecommuting—an increasingly pervasive new work mode enabled by advances in information technologies. Telecommuting can trigger important changes in employees job responsibilities, especially with respect to the degree of proactivity required to effectively work from a distance. Survey responses from a sample o...

— Agents are problem-solving entities that, thanks to characteristics such as autonomy, reactivity, proactivity and sociality, together with mobility, can be used to develop complex and distributed systems. In particular, mobility enables agents to migrate among several hosts, becoming active entities of networks. Java is today one of the most exploited languages to build mobile agent systems, ...

In a Multi-Agent System (MAS), agents preserve their proactivity and autonomy. Consequently, one associates an independent process with each of them. But when the simulation is only on a single mono-processor computer, the performance tends to be affected because computer resources are more limited. Unlike a system of multicomputers (where generally the real parallelism may be found), the manag...

Manufacturing competitiveness frequently relies on company ability to rapidly reconfigure their assembly systems. This paper introduces assembly system proactivity, a concept based on interrelated levels of automation, human competence, and information handling. Increased and structured human involvement contributes to increased system ability to proactively address predicted and unpredicted ev...

LPS (Logic-based Production System) is a framework that combines logic programs with reactive rules and a destructivelyupdated database. The logic programs provide proactive behavior and allow definitions of processes, and the reactive rules provide reactive behavior. This paper describes a first attempt in using LPS to model the operations of cutter suction dredging (CSD). It is the result of ...

The promise of adaptive user interfaces is that they will provide a flexible mechanism for systems to adapt to the needs of different users for a variety of tasks. As we consider such systems a basic trade-off arises between the responsibilities of the system and the user. We present a continuum that expresses potential balances of proactivity between the user and the system: what combinations ...

High-quality principal internships are defined, in part, by support from high-quality mentors. We traced the development and quality of mentor–intern relationships during an academic school year found that mentors played a significant role determining extent to which interns were isolated or integrated into leadership team. Specifically, influenced (1) types tasks activities allowed engage in, ...

Intergroup knowledge integration, that is the acquisition, processing, and utilization of across group boundaries, a critical source competitive advantage in modern organizations. Prior research has highlighted important role boundary spanning exchange for intergroup neglecting, however, question what makes individual spanners more effective fostering integration. Integrating literature with th...

Especially in the case of completely distributed or federated social networking platforms, multi-agent systems can play an important role. In particular, multi-agent systems have been used as (i) an underlying layer or a middleware for developing social networking platforms, (ii) a technology to increase the autonomous and intelligent behaviour of existing systems and (iii) a tool to develop si...