Towards an agent-based infrastructure for distributed virtual organizations

Agent technology has the potential to play a key role in building and supporting virtual enterprises. To host and enable agents an open infrastructure is needed. Beside standards, such an infrastructure should be generic and deployment independent to deal with the heterogeneity of the computing and information technology, e.g. by supporting devices like mobile phones, PDAs, and personal computers as well as different kinds of mobile and fixed networks. In this paper we give an overview over the agent platform LEAP, developed for small end user devices. We show the main issues in downsizing it to PDAs/mobile phones and applying agent technology in the area of virtual team support.