A unified approach to the development and usage of mobile agents

Mobile agents are an interesting approach to the development of distributed systems. By moving freely accross the network, they allow for the distribution of computation as well as gathering and filtering of information in an autonomous way. Over the last decade, the agent research community has decidedly achieved tremendous results. However, the community was not able to provide easy to use toolkits to make this paradigm available to a broader audience. By embracing simplicity during the creation of a formal model and a reference implementation to create and execute instances of that model, our aim is to enable a wide audience – even non-experts – to create, adapt and use mobile agents. The proposed model allows for the creation of agents by combining atomic, self-contained building blocks and we provide an approachable, easy to use graphical editor for the creation of model instances. In two evaluations, we could reinforce our believes that, with the achieved results, we could reach our aims

Using mobile agents for resource sharing

International audienceFrom the recent improvements in network and peer-to-peer technologies and the ever-growing needs for computer power, new ways of sharing resources between users have emerged. However, these new technologies allow only centralized calculus-sharing, even if they already offer "peer-to-peer" sharing of data. This paper presents a method based on multi-agent systems which allow load-sharing between distant users