Team awareness with mobile agents in mobile environments

There are several aspects involved in supporting human cooperative work by computers. One of them concerns team awareness to avoid unnecessary effort or even chaos. Notification services provide suited information about other team members and team relevant events. Traditionally, such services are realized by a central or distributed approach but exhibit shortcomings with respect to filtering policies and mobility of notified participants. A third alternative consists in applying mobile software agents. In this case, each participant is represented by one immobile and a number of mobile agents. The immobile agent manages all events that are caused by its user. Mobile agents are responsible to observe events being caused by other team members. They communicate either remotely or locally with managers of their partners. Advantages and disadvantages of all possible mechanisms are discussed.