User interface techniques for mobile agents

In mobile environments, the usage of mobile agents is very common. After being configured by the user, mobile agents can perform tasks autonomously and present their results when they have finished their task. In most cases, communication between user and agent is only necessary at the time of configuration and at the time of presentation, when the agent has accomplished its task. Our research activities deal with agent-based applications for mobile users with mobile devices of low processing power and without Java capabilities, which yields the question of how user interfaces can be implemented. In this paper, different approaches for the communication between users and agents are summarized and classified with respect to our applications. An agent platform gateway is introduced as our approach to user interface implementation and some services of the gateway are described in detail.