A multi-agent-based management system for pervasive collaborative computing environment

To support advanced collaboration among knowledge workers distributed geographically, there have been extensive researches under the scope of pervasive computing environment. Especially, to cope with difficult operation of traditional room-based collaboration environment, several conceptual frameworks are designed and prototyped. For easy operation, in this paper, we design a management system for multiparty collaboration environment. The proposed system manages a set of distributed software components belonging to meeting nodes by user-generated specification for a common collaborative task. Based on the proposed design, we implement a multi-agent-based management toolkit, which supports software agents to abstract the functionalities of meeting nodes, services, and tools and to configure and operate each collaboration nodes. Finally, we demonstrate how to operate meeting nodes according to user-generated specification for multi-party video conferencing.