A Case Study in Role-based Agent Interactions to Perform Administrative Tasks

Mobile agents are an emerging approach to develop distributed and parallel applications. They also can be used to develop enterprise applications, since they can act as active network components, and can execute on heterogeneous platforms and architectures. They also grant a high level of automatism, since they can be developed to perform one or more tasks without needing user interactions. In this paper we analyze the interaction issues of an agent based application for the automatic upgrade of Java programs, and propose a role-based approach to deal with the occurring interactions. Such an approach enables the development of flexible and reusable agent based applications, which can also be exploited by enterprise systems to simplify administrative tasks