An agent-based approach to assess drivers’ interaction with pre-trip information systems.

This article reports on the practical use of a multi-agent microsimulation framework to address the issue of assessing drivers’ responses to pretrip information systems. The population of drivers is represented as a community of autonomous agents, and travel demand results from the decision-making deliberation performed by each individual of the population as regards route and departure time. A simple simulation scenario was devised, where pretrip information was made available to users on an individual basis so that its effects at the aggregate level could be observed. The simulation results show that the overall performance of the system is very likely affected by exogenous information, and these results are ascribed to demand formation and network topology. The expressiveness offered by cognitive approaches based on predicate logics, such as the one used in this research, appears to be a promising approximation to fostering more complex behavior modelling, allowing us to represent many of the mental aspects involved in the deliberation process

Design of a Mobile Agent for Monitoring Activities of Users

Monitoring is an aspect of network management aimed at ensuring optimal performance of the network and that the users play by the rules. This paper presents the design of a mobile agent for monitoring the activities of users in a network. Users’ activities can be localized on their personal workstation or extended to the enterprise network and the Internet, in which case it can impact on the subscribed bandwidth, which is a shared resource of the corporate entity that they represent. All users hope to work in an environment of unlimited resources, including disk space, RAM and bandwidth. However, though the cost of these computing resources have reduced significantly owning to advances in microelectronic technology, they are still far from being free and inexhaustible. In this research, we design a mobile agent tool that can monitor users’ activities in a network environment with a view to enhancing the effective utilisation of system resources, and in particular, the physical memory. The aim is to enable optimal resource utilisation in the network environment. In this paper, we define a mathematical formulation of user activities, load overhead of mobile agents and itinerary partition to avoid the over-bloating problem. The architecture of the mobile agent is explained. Keywords: Mobile Agent; System resources; Computer network; Code Mobility; Monitorin

Design of a Mobile Agent for Monitoring Activities of Users

Monitoring is an aspect of network management aimed at ensuring optimal performance of the network and that the users play by the rules. This paper presents the design of a mobile agent for monitoring the activities of users in a network. Users’ activities can be localized on their personal workstation or extended to the enterprise network and the Internet, in which case it can impact on the subscribed bandwidth, which is a shared resource of the corporate entity that they represent. All users hope to work in an environment of unlimited resources, including disk space, RAM and bandwidth. However, though the cost of these computing resources have reduced significantly owning to advances in microelectronic technology, they are still far from being free and inexhaustible. In this research, we design a mobile agent tool that can monitor users’ activities in a network environment with a view to enhancing the effective utilisation of system resources, and in particular, the physical memory. The aim is to enable optimal resource utilisation in the network environment. In this paper, we define a mathematical formulation of user activities, load overhead of mobile agents and itinerary partition to avoid the over-bloating problem. The architecture of the mobile agent is explained. Keywords: Mobile Agent, System resources, Computer network, Code Mobility, Monitorin

Behavioral pattern analysis of secure migration and communications in eCommerce using cryptographic protocols on a mobile MAS platform

Mobile Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) systems can be used with real success in a growing number of eCommerce applications nowadays. Security has been identified as numerous times by different researchers as a top criterion for the acceptance of mobile agent adoption. In this paper we present an in-depth analysis of behavior patterns of a mobile MAS platform when using different cryptographic protocols to assure communication and migration integrity and confidentiality. Different use case sceneries of eCommerce applications as well as many other aspects have been studied, such as overhead, different communication patterns, different loads and bandwidth issues. This work is also extensible to other mobile and non-mobile MAS platforms. The results obtained can be used and should be taken into account by designers and implementers of secure mobile and also non-mobile agent platforms and agents.European Union TeleCARE IST-2000-2760

Mobile-Agent Planning in a Market-Oriented Environment

We propose a method for increasing incentives for sites to host arbitrary mobile agents in which mobile agents purchase their computing needs from host sites. We present a scalable market-based CPU allocation policy and an on-line algorithm that plans a mobile agent\u27s expenditure over a multihop ordered itinerary. The algorithm chooses a set of sites at which to execute and computational priorities at each site to minimize execution time while preserving a prespecified budget constraint. We present simulation results of our algorithm to show that our allocation policy and planning algorithm scale well as more agents are added to the system

Computational Markets to Regulate Mobile-Agent Systems

Mobile-agent systems allow applications to distribute their resource consumption across the network. By prioritizing applications and publishing the cost of actions, it is possible for applications to achieve faster performance than in an environment where resources are evenly shared. We enforce the costs of actions through markets where user applications bid for computation from host machines. \par We represent applications as collections of mobile agents and introduce a distributed mechanism for allocating general computational priority to mobile agents. We derive a bidding strategy for an agent that plans expenditures given a budget and a series of tasks to complete. We also show that a unique Nash equilibrium exists between the agents under our allocation policy. We present simulation results to show that the use of our resource-allocation mechanism and expenditure-planning algorithm results in shorter mean job completion times compared to traditional mobile-agent resource allocation. We also observe that our resource-allocation policy adapts favorably to allocate overloaded resources to higher priority agents, and that agents are able to effectively plan expenditures even when faced with network delay and job-size estimation error