Distributed Collaborations Using Network Mobile Agents

This paper describes a mobile agent-based approach for supporting coordination of user activities in distributed collaborations. The approach presented here uses XML to specify a collaboration plan in terms of various participants’ roles, access rights based on roles, and the coordination actions to be executed when certain events occur. Using this plan an agent-based distributed middleware system provides each user an interface to perform the tasks pertaining to the collaboration. The actions of a user transparently create and dispatch coordination agents to other users. The middleware also enforces the security constraints defined in the collaboration plan. We illustrate our approach with an example system for collaborative authoring implemented using the Ajanta mobile agent system.