An Agent-Oriented Framework for Constructing Mobile Agent Systems

Agents and mobile agents hold significant benefits for current trends in computing. Despite some industries actively exploring mobile agent applications the promised deployment has not taken place as expected. Possible incompatibility between the general view of a mobile agent and the diverse definitions of agents has been raised as one of the potential reasons why industry has not yet adopted agent and mobile technology as widely as expected. Developing agent systems requires specialized skills and knowledge in various areas. Accordingly, regardless of a novice mobile agent programmer's computing background, he/she usually has to assimilate new knowledge in order to implement mobile agents. Furthermore, to realise the full potential of mobile agents, they should be implemented according to proper agent programming principles. This paper describes a framework for constructing a mobile agent system that takes agent orientation into account to provide a programming model for novice mobile agent programmers.School of Computin

Architectural components for the efficient design of mobile agent systems

Over the past eighteen months, there has been a renewed interest in mobile agent technology due to the continued exponential growth of Internet applications, the establishment of open standards for these applications, as well as the semantic web developments. However, the lack of a standardised programming model addressing all aspects of mobile agent systems prevents widespread deployment of the potentially useful technology. The architectural requirements dealing with all aspects of a mobile agent system are not clearly stipulated. As a result, the commercially available mobile agent systems and mobile agent tool kits address different mobile agent issues, and little reuse of available technologies and architectures takes place. The purpose of this paper is to describe an architectural model that identifies the components representing the essential aspects of a mobile agent system. Due to the intensive nature of development, implementation and testing of this model, we describe preliminary work. However, in the meanwhile, there are benefits associated with this preliminary model, namely that it provides a clear understanding of the architectural issues of mobile agent computing, giving novice researchers and practitioners who enters the field for the first time a foundation for making sensible decisions when researching, designing and developing mobile agents. The model is also significant in that it provides a benchmark for researchers and developers to measure the capabilities of mobile agents created by commercially available tool kits.Mobile Agent Systems, Software architecture modelSchool of Computin

ATOMAS : a transaction-oriented open multi agent system; final report

The electronic marketplace of the future will consist of a large number of services located on an open, distributed and heterogeneous platform, which will be used by an even larger number of clients. Mobile Agent Systems are considered to be a precondition for the evolution of such an electronic market. They can provide a flexible infrastructure for this market, i.e. for the installation of new services by service agents as well as for the utilization of these services by client agents. Mobile Agent Systems basically consist of a number of locations and agents. Locations are (logical) abstractions for (physical) hosts in a computer network. The network of locations serves as a unique and homogeneous platform, while the underlying network of hosts may be heterogeneous and widely distributed. Locations therefore have to guarantee independence from the underlying hard- and software. To make the Mobile Agent System an open platform, the system furthermore has to guarantee security of hosts against malicious attacks