Combining Mobile Agents and Process-based Coordination to Achieve Software Adaptation

We have developed a model and a platform for end-to-end run-time monitoring, behavior and performance analysis, and consequent dynamic adaptation of distributed applications. This paper concentrates on how we coordinate and actuate the potentially multi-part adaptation, operating externally to the target systems, that is, without requiring any a priori built-in adaptation facilities on the part of said target systems. The actual changes are performed on the fly onto the target by communities of mobile software agents, coordinated by a decentralized process engine. These changes can be coarse-grained, such as replacing entire components or rearranging the connections among components, or fine-grained, such as changing the operational parameters, internal state and functioning logic of individual components. We discuss our successful experience using our approach in dynamic adaptation of a large-scale commercial application, which requires both coarse and fine grained modifications

Secure Dynamic Reconfiguration of Scalable CORBA Systems with Mobile Agents

. As various Internet services, e-commerce, and information systems permeate our lives, their continual availability becomes a dominant issue. But continuing software evolution requires system reconguration. Running systems must upgrade their components or change their conguration parameters. In addition, Internet services often need to serve thousands or millions of users. This scenario raises three conicting issues: availability, congurability, and scalability. We propose the use of mobile reconguration agents for the ecient, secure, and scalable dynamic reconguration of Internet systems. We describe a CORBA object-oriented framework that supports dynamic reconguration and allows customization to dierent kinds of computing environments ranging from PDAs and embedded systems with limited resources to powerful workstations. 1 Introduction The scope of Internet services continues to expand, stretching to new elds and encompassing more and more human activities in ..