Interaction-Oriented Rule Management for Mobile Agent Applications

Abstract

The characteristic features of delegation and interaction make the mobile agent programming paradigm on the one hand attractive for a wide range of distributed applications -- in particular those related to E-Commerce -- but on the other hand also pose a considerable semantical risk potential. In this paper, we present a generic approach of imposing rules on the behavior of mobile agents aiming primarily at reducing this kind of risk without impairing the agents' basic decision logic and interaction ability. On the contrary, strong emphasis will be put on the algorithms, design and implementation of rules used to support the interaction between agents. Keywords: dynamic rule management, mobile agent, interaction support, ECommerce. 1 Introduction 1.1 Motivation Mobile agent technology is increasingly considered as the right mean to build innovative, user-friendly and more "intelligent" E-Commerce applications (s. [KJ98] for a broad overview). However, the reason of its popularity i..