Programming the Mobility Behaviour of Agents by Composing Itineraries

. We present an algebra for programming the itineraries of mobile agents. The algebra contains operators for modelling sequential, parallel, nondeterministic, and conditional mobility behaviour. Iterative behaviour is also modelled by a language of regular itineraries borrowing ideas from regular expressions. We give an operational semantics for the operators using Plotkin-style transition rules and provide examples of itineraries for meeting scheduling, sales order processing, and network modelling. 1 Introduction Mobile agents can be regarded as software components which can move from one host to another to perform computations. Mobile agents have many benefits for distributed computing such as reducing network load by moving computation to data and asynchronous computation [5]. With the growing popularity of the mobile agent paradigm (e.g., [12, 10]) and the increasing ubiquity of networked computers, we envision future mobile agent applications involving complex movements of agent..