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Purpose – People do not just interact, with each other; rather, they engage with each other using the visual and verbal instrumentations of communication at their disposal, constructing meaningful and intelligible conversations with differing degrees of precision of intention and clarity of expression. In doing this, they employ the “fundamental features of language,” described in various semiotic and structuralist theories.

Methodology – Here, we synthesize and integrate the key aspects of these language theories in an attempt to apply them to everyday conversations. The language features in question are routinely put into play by human agents to convey attitudes, emotions, opinions, and information and to achieve an engagement with the other.

Findings – Human relations, expansive in their range and intricate in their forms, demand complex instrumentations with which to conduct them. These instrumentations are essential features of the linguistic socialization of human agents, integral to both memory and habits of speech.

Mobile agent, as a new mobile computing technology, has been applied to various parallel and distributed computing problem solutions. Several mobile agent systems have been built to drive the agents following a platform dependant scheme, and some formal approaches have been proposed to describe mobile agents’ behaviors or properties for respective purposes. However, there remains a lack of a standard approach to describing a mobile agent algorithm and its semantics from the viewpoint of a practical program, which makes it difficult to specify an algorithm unambiguously and verify its correctness formally. This paper proposes a practical approach to overcome that difficulty by defining a script language and associated mechanisms to specify and verify mobile agent algorithms. The language, called SMAL, can describe mobile agent’s behaviors clearly due to its explicitly defined semantics. Based on the semantics, a transformation function for converting the specified algorithm to its equivalent specification in Mobile UNITY, a well‐known mobile computation formal approach for correctness verification, is presented. Formal verification of the algorithms can be accomplished based on the UNITY‐logic rules.

In the vision of pervasive computing, numerous heterogeneous devices, various information services, and users performing daily activities are physically co‐located in a environment. How can we coordinate the services and devices to assist a particular user in receiving a particular service so as to maximize the user’s satisfaction? To solve this human‐centered coordination issue, we propose an agent‐based service coordination framework for pervasive computing. It is called location‐aware middle agent framework. The middle agent takes account of the user location in cognitive way (based on location‐ontology), and determines best‐matched services for the user. Based on this coordination framework, we have developed a multi‐agent architecture for pervasive computing, called CONSORTS (Coordination System of Real‐world Transaction Services). In this paper, we first outline some requirements of the human‐centered service coordination in pervasive computing. Secondly, we describe location‐aware middle agent framework to fill the requirements. Lastly, we outline CONSORTS, an prototype of location‐aware middle agent framework, and two applications of CONSORTS, location‐aware information assistance services in a museum and wireless‐LAN based location systems on FIPA agent Networks.

For knowledge transfer in multinational organizations, knowledge management studies draw on diverse practices, such as employees’ language proficiency or environments, such as cultural contexts, but pay little attention to the practical role of external agents, i.e. translators. The purpose of this study is to analyze how translators facilitate knowledge transfer, using their professional identity in relation to employees’ cultural competence and organizations’ Human Resource Management (HRM) practices.

This study examines survey data on 182 translators and 206 HRM managers who work in multinational organizations. Regarding common method bias, comparing people with different views and inclusion of control variables collected from archival sources will help the empirical results to be robust.

This study finds that translators’ business-oriented professional identities complement employees’ cultural competence and eventually promote knowledge transfer. Furthermore, translators’ business-oriented professional identities are enhanced by organizations’ commitment-based HRM practices.

This study expands knowledge management studies by incorporating external agents into the analysis of knowledge transfer. Particularly for the language approach in knowledge management, the framework of this study sheds light on the critical dimension of translators’ professional identity for organizational goals. Practically, this study suggests that multinational organizations should design commitment-based HRM practices to motivate translators’ business-oriented identity for knowledge transfer.

The colors of change is an overview of change paradigms, created about two decades ago, that has been intensively used, tested, refined, shared, and elaborated by practitioners and academics alike. Here, the “color theory” is presented as it is now, and is situated within the literature. Its four main applications are described as well as rules of thumb that have been derived from reflective practice. This chapter illustrates that the color theory is clearly not one thing to all people, as it is understood in very different ways, both in terms of its theoretical foundations as well as the complexity of its applications. This probably adds to the versatility of the theory. Bringing together key insights about the color theory for academics and practitioners, this chapter strives both to give a concise overview and to explore its richness.

This paper aims to deal with the problem of multi‐plant purchase coordination in an assemble‐to‐order (ATO) environment, when volume discount schedules are provided by each of the suppliers.

This paper uses linear programming and a multi‐agent system to coordinate multi‐plant purchasing activities in order to minimize the total purchasing cost.

An integrated linear programming model and multi‐agent approach is perfectly suited to the purchase coordination in multi‐plant organizations in order to achieve the global profit.

The proposed model provides an effective and efficient coordination mechanism that helps multi‐plant organization and suppliers to maintain the availability of materials in the right quantity, with the right quality and at minimum possible cost.

An intelligent agent‐based information warfare advisor is being developed for the Strategic Crisis Exercise at the US Army War College. This paper will provide some background on intelligent agents and will then describe the proposed architecture for building this intelligent agent‐based information warfare (IW) advisor (called “Bob‐in‐a‐box” ‐ named after our IW domain expert, Bob Minehart).

First this paper introduces the concepts of virtual manufacturing system (VMS). The host enterprise and the multiple numbers of supply and distribution enterprises that make up a VMS, and the hierarchical and horizontal relationship that exists between these enterprises are explained. The steps involved in formation and operation of a VMS are then analyzed in detail. Second, we present a three view based methodological approach to make a multi‐agent model of VMS. Finally, with the help of a testing prototype, we show how to develop an autonomous Internet based data collection system for operation of VMS in accordance with the proposed methodological approach.

Smart spaces are open complex computing systems, consisting of a large variety of cooperative smart things. Central to building smart spaces is the support for sophisticated coordination among diverse smart things collaborating to accomplish specified tasks. Multi‐agent systems are often used as the software infrastructures to address the coordination issue in smart spaces. However, since agents in smart spaces are dynamic, resource‐bounded and have complicated service dependencies, current approaches to coordination in multi‐agent systems encounter new challenges when applied in smart spaces. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

The paper presents Baton, a service management system to explicitly resolve the particular issues stemming from smart spaces when coordinating agents. Baton is designed as a complement to coordination approaches in multi‐agent systems with a focus on mechanisms for service discovery, composition, request arbitration and dependency maintenance. Baton is now deployed in our own smart spaces to achieve better agent coordination.

The effectiveness and efficiency of Baton is validated by its practical use in the designed scenario and some evaluation experiments.

An attempt at performing dynamic service composition in Baton is made by using semantic information in future work.

Baton, a service management system to explicitly resolve the particular issues stemming from smart spaces when coordinating agents is presented.

The purpose of this paper is to presents the current and prospective state of affairs when it comes to the information and communication technologies (ICTs) in condition monitoring (CM) and maintenance, especially for the e-maintenance approach.

The author presents some of the standards for the domain of interest, such as the open system architecture condition-based maintenance. In addition, the e-maintenance approach is gone through as well as such ICTs as, for instance, the emergent web technologies, the service-oriented architecture (SOA), the web services and the Web 2.0 are analysed.

The findings highlight the need for a clearer understanding of the characteristics of different ICTs, such as Web 2.0 technologies, Cloud computing, agent technologies, etc., to be able to use them in an optimal manner for various purposes in the e-maintenance applications. In addition, the standardisation of the emergent ICTs different aspects is shown to be an important factor for the development of different phases of software as well as for its overall acceptance.

The given work presents the current and emergent ICTs for the domain of interest and provides the discussion and various issues connected to these ICTs.

The author provides practical implications of the different ICTs mentioned in the paper, i.e. benefits and possibilities as well as risks when those technologies are implemented for CM and maintenance, especially for the e-maintenance.

The paper provides insight into various current and prospective ICTs for the domain of interest that provides important knowledge for different employees with the objective of a purchase, users of the system, such as technicians, maintenance engineers as well as developers of these systems. Consequently, the paper provides knowledge of different characteristics of the current and prospective technologies, which is important to take into account in order to be able not only to use them in an optimal manner, but also to understand possible constraints if they are used in the system and in applications in the domain.