Mobile agent middleware for dependable distributed systems

摘要

A platform for enabling multiple agents to migrate between computers and be organized in a non-centralized manner. The platform introduces two unique notions for dynamic compositions and inter-agent interactions into mobile agent computing. The first enable an agent to contain other agents inside it and migrate to another agent or computer with its inner agents. It provides a powerful approach to composing and deploying large-scale mobile software. The second enable an agent to define its destination according to another agent's location with several policies to support adaptation on distributed systems. It also introduces several higher-level coordinations between mobile agents, e.g., master-slave and redundancy, which are useful to implement distributed systems. This paper also describes a prototype implementation of the platform with mobile agent technology and several applications of it.