are used in practice). Finally, Section 5.4 describes detailed experiments that illustrate characteristics of the AA MDP.

## 5.1  The E-Elves In Daily Use

The E-Elves system was heavily used by ten users in a research group at ISI, between June 200 and December 2000. 5  The Friday agents ran continuously, around the clock, seven dys a week. The exact number of agents running varied over the period of execution, with usually five to ten Friday agents for individual users, a capability matcher (with proxy),
and an interest matcher (with proxy). Occasionally, temporary Friday agents operated on behalf of special guests or other short-term visitors.

![0_image_0.png](0_image_0.png)

period.
Figure 7 plots the number of daily messages exchanged by the Fridays over seven months
(June through December, 2000). The size of the daily counts reflects the large amount of coordination necessary to manage various activities, while the high variability illustrates the dynamic nature of the domain (note the low periods during vacations and final exams).

Figure 8(a) illustrates the number of meetings monitored for each user.  Over the seven months, nearly 700 meetings where monitored. Some users had fewer than 20 meetings, while others had over 250. Most users had about 50% of their meetings delayed (this includes regularly scheduled meetings that were cancelled, for instance due to travel). Figure 8(b)
shows that usually 50% or more of delayed meetings were autonomously delayed. In this graph, repeated delays of a single meeting are counted only once. The graphs show that the