Towards an Ontology for Agent Mobility

摘要

The benefits of agent mobility have been recognized for a variety of applications such as wireless ad hoc environments and network management. Mobile agent toolkits have been developed in response; however, they do not address the need for conceptual modeling techniques required for the analysis and design phases of mobile agent applications. On the other hand, conceptual level modeling techniques developed as part of Agent Oriented Software Engineering methodologies do not specifically address the requirement for modeling mobility. This paper represents a first step towards developing support for conceptual modeling of mobile agents, in terms of an ontology describing the abstract concepts and inter-relationships required to model agent mobility. The specific aim of this paper is to present an ontology that is widely applicable, not constrained by the peculiarities of any one mobile agent toolkit or application, and specified using an easily understood informal vocabulary.