Habin Lee is a senior research fellow in Brunel University's Brunel Business School. He contributed to the mPower project at BT for more than five years before joining Brunel. His research interests include agent technology for business processes, information systems development methodology, and computer-supported cooperative work. He received his PhD in management information systems from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Contact him at Business & Management, Brunel Business School, Brunel Univ.,

One of the obstacles preventing the widespread adoption of multi-agent systems in industry is

One of the main application areas for multiagent systems technology is enterprise mobilization, wherein the main business process actors are nomadic workers. An agent's autonomy, sociality and intelligence are highly prized features when it comes to supporting those mobile workers who are geographically isolated from the main knowledge source (i.e. the corporate hitranet) and are frequently moving from oiie location to another. Based oii experience gained from nvo field trials of applicatioiis (built using for multi-agent systems technology and ruriniiig on lighnveight haridheld devices) that support mobile business processes for telecommunications service provisioning and mairitenance, this paper proposes desirable metrics for any multi-agent systems platform iritended for enterprise mobilisation use. These metrics are then used to compare (I number of existirig multi-agent Systems platforms, and based on the results, this paper idetitijies some areas for improvemerit.

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