In recent years, interest in collaborative agents has increased due to the fact that most applications also require collaboration with other systems and their users. Although we have started from a different need, namely understanding the way people work, collaborate, and communicate in their environment (i.e. their work practice), we have developed an agent-based simulation environment (Brahms) that deals with a number of the same issues as the intelligent agent community is now addressing.

Recently, we have started a research project (Mobile Agents) in which we are using Brahms as a multi-agent development environment for distributed agents in the complex domain of Human-Robot Extra-Vehicular Activities on planetary surfaces, such as on future missions to Mars.

In this talk I will present an overview of the Brahms environment and language, based on the Mobile Agents project. I will first describe Brahms as a work practice modeling and simulation environment, and will then show how we have moved Brahms from a pure simulation environment to a distributed multi-agent runtime environment that can now also be used to develop distributed intelligent agent systems.

Keywords: multi-agents, human-robot interaction, work practice, modeling, simulation, distributed systems.

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