Within the last five years the paradigm of Intelligent and Mobile Agents has gained momentum in the field of software engineering. Mobile Agents (MAs) are autonomous, asynchronous and intelligent soft-ware entities which, in order to fulfil their tasks, can migrate to and reside in a number of networked nodes. A variety of agent languages, architec-tures and platforms have been developed within the last three years in academia and industry, including AgentTCL, Telescript, Tabriz, Active X, Java and a variety of Java enhancements, such as Aglets, Java-To-Go, etc. However, all of these developments are incompatible with each other and designed for specific environments and application domains, due to the lack of agent standards. The application of the agent technology, however, has already a history and spreads over many areas, including user interface/personal assis-tance, mobile computing, information retrieval & filtering, data mining, smart massaging, the electronic marketplace, and telecommunication ser-vices control and service / network management. The last two areas represent still new application fields for agent technology, now rapidly gaining importance in the problem area addressed by the emerging global Information Infrastructure.
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