Mobile Teamwork Research Articles

A Mobile Agent Team Works based on Load-Balancing Middleware for Distributed Computing Systems

The aim of this paper is to present a load balancing middleware for parallel and distributed systems. The great challenge is to balance the tasks between heterogeneous distributed nodes for parallel and distributed computing models based distributed systems, by the way to ensure HPC (High performance computing) of these models. Accordingly, the proposed middleware is based on mobile agent team work which implements an efficient method with two strategies: (i) Load balancing Strategy that determines the node tasks assignment based on node performance, and (ii) Rebalancing Strategy that detects the unbalanced nodes and enables tasks migration. The paper focuses on the proposed middleware and its cooperative mobile agent team work model strategies to dynamically balance the nodes, and scale up distributed computing systems. Indeed, some experimental results that highlight the performance and efficiency of the proposed middleware are presented.

Architectural concerns in distributed and mobile collaborative systems

Organizations increasingly coordinate their product and service development processes to deliver their products and services as fast as possible, and to involve employees, customers, suppliers, and business partners seamlessly in different stages of the processes. These processes have to consider that their participants are increasingly on the move or distributed while they are working. Expertise needs to be shared across locations and different mobile devices. This paper describes a framework for distributed and mobile collaboration, defines a set of requirements for virtual communities, and discusses a mobile teamwork support software architecture that has been developed in the EU-project MOTION. The framework together with the architecture enables to enhance current collaboration approaches to include the dimension of mobile participants and virtual communities for distributed product development. This is achieved by integrating process and workspace management requirements with Peer-to-Peer Middleware, Publish-Subscribe, and Community and User Management components.

A Service Architecture for Mobile Teamwork

Mobile teamwork has become an emerging requirement in the daily business of large enterprises. Employees collaborate across locations and need team support while they are on the move. Business documents and expertise need to be shared independent of the actual location or connectivity (e.g., access through a mobile phone, laptop, Personal Digital Assistant, etc.) of employees. Although many collaboration tools and systems exist, most do not deal with new demanding requirements such as locating artifacts and experts through distributed searches, advanced information subscription and notification, and mobile information sharing and access. The MOTION service architecture that we have developed supports mobile teamwork by taking into account the different connectivity modes of users, provides access support for various devices such as laptop computers and mobile phones, and uses XML meta data and the XML Query Language (XQL) for distributed searches and subscriptions. In this article, we describe the architecture and the components of our generic MOTION services platform for building collaborative applications. The MOTION platform is currently being evaluated in two large industry case-studies.