An Agent-Oriented Framework for Constructing Mobile Agent Systems (original) (raw)

Providing applications with mobile agent technology

2001

Over the last couple of years we have been working on the development of mobile agents systems and its application to the areas of telecommunications and network management. This work path produced positive results: a competitive mobile agent platform was built, the run-time benefits of mobile agents were proved, and our industrial partners have developed practical applications that are being integrated into commercial products.

An approach to facilitating the training of mobile agent programmers and encouraging the progression to an agent-oriented paradigm

2009

Mobile agents hold significant benefits for the rapid expansion of Internet applications and current trends in computing. Despite continued interest, the promised deployment has not taken place, indicating a need for a programming model to introduce novice mobile agent programmers to this environment/paradigm. Accordingly the research question asked was, "Since novice mobile agent programmers 1 require a paradigm shift to construct successful systems, how can they be equipped to grasp the contextual issues and gain the necessary skills within reasonable time limits?" To answer the question, a complete reference providing contextual information and knowledge of mobile agent system development was compiled. Simultaneously novices are introduced to agent orientation. A generic mobile agent system architectural model, incorporating guidelines for programming mobile agents, further provides a framework that can be used to design a mobile agent system. These two structures are presented in a knowledge base that serves as a referencing tool to unlock concepts and knowledge units to novices while developing mobile agent systems.

Architectural guidelines for Mobile Agent Systems

In , Lange claims that lack of a programming model for agent-based applications prevents wider mobile agent deployment, while Johansen argues that it is easy for a systems programmer to build and deploy a mobile agent, but that novice users need a better way to create agents. Kendall et al reason that agent development to date has been done independently, leading to problems such as could assist in a more wide-spread use of mobile agents. The purpose of this literature survey is to gain a knowledge base of the current practices in programming mobile agents in order to formulate such a set of guidelines for creating/programming and using a mobile agent efficiently.

Mobile Agent Systems: From Technology To Applications

2000

Over the last couple of years we have been working on the development of mobile agents systems and its application to the areas of telecommunications and network management. This work path produced positive results: a competitive mobile agent platform was built, the run-time benefits of mobile agents were proved, and our industrial partners have developed practical applications that are being integrated into commercial products. However, despite the positive results, we feel that mobile agent technology is still not ready to enter the path of mainstream software development. This is the reason why this technology has not yet gain large acceptance by the developers of real applications, despite the large number of interesting experiences already available. In our perspective, one of the main reasons for this situation arises from the traditional approach to mobile agent technology. This approach, based on the familiar concept of mobile agent distributed platforms as extensions of the operating system, focuses too much on mobile agents and associated issues (mobility, agent lifecycle, security, coordination, etc.) and provides poor support for the development of applications where mobile agents are just one of several available technologies. Learning from past experience, we are now working on a new approach where the focus is brought back to the applications and mobile agents become just one the tools available to develop distributed systems. This provides a much lighter framework for application-based mobile agents This paper presents the lessons learned from our previous project and discusses this new concept we are developing: application-centric mobile agent systems. * Mobile agents do impose more complex security problems in fully open environments where there is no user accountability (for authentication and authorization). Nevertheless, most applications are not deployed in that kind of environments.

Mobile Agents - The new paradigm in computing

The emergence of agent based systems is signalling the beginning of one of the most important paradigm shifts in computing since object oriented methods and client/server based distributed systems. This paradigm shift will obviously require technology development, but of equal importance, or perhaps of even more importance, it will also require substantial education and methodology development. It is not hard to predict that agent technology is an important emerging technology, since it is already beginning to send shock waves through the computer industry. In the current hype, however, it is particularly difficult to distinguish publicity from reality and to get a clear impression of what agents are all about. In this paper we will try to give a comprehensive overview of what mobile agents are, what they may be used for and what the technical issues are. 1. Introduction The importance of agent technology is not hard to predict, since shock waves are already being felt th...

Design issues in mobile agent programming systems

IEEE Concurrency, 1998

We describe the mobile agent paradigm which is becoming increasingly popular for network-centric programming, and compare it with earlier paradigms for distributed computing from which it has evolved. The design of mobile agent systems requires the resolution of several system-level issues, such as the provision of code mobility, object naming, portability, scalability, and a range of security issues that go hand-in-hand with mobile code. Agent programming requires suitable languages and programming models that can support code mobility, and runtime systems that provide some fundamental primitives for the creation, migration and management of agents. We discuss these requirements and describe several mobile agent systems that illustrate di erent approaches taken by designers to address the problems.

Mobile Agents: A Construction Kit for Mobile Device Applications

Abstract—Mobile Agents are a well-known programming,paradigm nowadays. There is a multitude of research concerning Mobile Agent Systems with emphasize on agent coordination, agent languages and agent migration technology. On the one hand, it is often argued, that Mobile Agents are well-suited for the use in the Internet and especially with Mobile Devices and roaming users. On the other hand, there are only few publications describing the actual implementation of a Mobile Agent System for Mobile Devices. In this paper we present our implementation of the Mobile Agent System Okeanos for the use in mobile environments with emphasize in agent routing and forwarding.

MAP: Design and implementation of a mobile agents' platform

Journal of Systems Architecture, 2000

The recent development of telecommunication networks has contributed to the success of applications such as information retrieval and electronic commerce, as well as all the services that take advantage of communication in distributed systems. In this area, the emerging technology of mobile agents aroused considerable interest. Mobile agents are applications that can move through the network for carrying out a given task on behalf of the user. In this work we present a platform (called MAP (Mobile Agents Platform)) for the development and the management of mobile agents. The language used both for developing the platform and for carrying out the agents is Java. The platform gives the user all the basic tools needed for creating some applications based on the use of agents. It enables us to create, run, suspend, resume, deactivate, reactivate local agents, to stop their execution, to make them communicate each other and migrate.

Agents as catalysts for mobile computing

2005

Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) offers an alternative and radical approach to the development of information systems in various domains. However, one domain that AOP has only minimally affected, at least up until now, is that of mobile computing. Until recently, the use of strong intentional agents in such a domain has been considered impractical and, indeed, computationally intractable.