A Methodology for Improving the Performance of Agent-Based Applications Through the Identification of the Optimal Number of Mobile Agents

摘要

The results of the research in the area of Mobile Agent Technology (MAT) have demonstrated the utility of this paradigm in building a wide range of distributed applications and systems. In the past few years, we have witnessed an enthusiastic interest in MAT and plenty of research activities have been carried out. Despite this effort, a number of issues concerning mainly the performance optimisation of agent-based applications are still open. In this paper, we investigate the problem of optimising the number of mobile agents used in an agent-based application in order to improve its performance. As an outcome of our research, we propose a methodology for the decision of the optimum number of mobile agents. To investigate the effect of the number of mobile agents on the performance of agent-based applications and to evaluate the proposed methodology through real measurements, an agent-based distributed application was designed and implemented.