Toward Interoperability of Mobile-Agent Systems

Information and Software Technology, 2008

Mobile agent technology has grown in acceptance over the years for distributed applications, but it is yet to be adopted as ubiquitous solution technique. This is due to its complexity and lack of interoperability. Mobile agent executes on mobile agent platform, these platforms from different vendors are design, and language specific, and are thus non interoperable. In other words mobile agent built on one platform cannot interact with or execute on any other platform. There is a need to provide a common base on which agents from different vendors can interact and interoperate. This work presents a framework for mobile agent interoperability by providing an Embedded Mobile Agent (EMA) system into the Windows Operating System kernel so that it can run as a service; this was done to eliminate the overheads associated with the agent platforms and enhance mobile agents’ interoperability. The targeted OS were Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows7. https://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/

Proceedings DOA'00. International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications, 2000

The Mobile Agent (MA) paradigm proposes several attractive solutions to deal with the problems of networkcentric programming. Despite the availability of several MA platforms, there are still only a few MA-based distributed services. The paper claims that the lack of interoperability is one of the major obstacles to the largescale diffusion of the MA paradigm, and discusses solutions to permit the interworking between heterogeneous MA frameworks and other systems, whether MA-based or not, via compliance with either accepted or emerging interoperability standards. In particular, we focus on compliance with CORBA, the accepted standard for OO components, but also with MASIF and FIPA, respectively, the OMG specification for the support of agent mobility and management, and the framework for standard languages and protocols in agent communication. The paper also reports performance results of CORBA-based interoperability in the SOMA programming framework: the presented costs, measured for a systems management application, show the feasibility of the adopted interoperability solutions.

1998

Mobile agents are a relatively new technology, but there are already a number of implementations, such as AgentTcl [6], Aglets [4], MOA [8], Grasshopper [12], and Odyssey [7]. These systems differ widely in architecture and implementation, thereby impeding interoperability, rapid proliferation of agent technology, and growth of the industry. To promote interoperability and system diversity, some aspects of mobile agent technology must be standardized. MASIF [1] is a collection of definitions and interfaces that provides an interoperable interface for mobile agent systems. It is as simple and generic as possible to allow for future advances in mobile agent systems. MASIF specifies two interfaces: MAFAgentSystem (for agent transfer and management) and MAFFinder (for naming and locating). The original intent for MASIF was to keep it simple for the first phase and only deal with the minimal features needed for interoperability. For example, MASIF defines parameters in the agent profile to specify the requirements the agent has on the receiving agent system. This allows an agent system to support as many agent profiles as its implementation allows. Language interoperability is just one of the parameters in the agent profile. This is not a big limitation because Java is becoming the de facto standard. Therefore, interoperability in this document is not about

. This paper introduces a CORBA service dedicated to the transport of agent communication. It explains how this service completes the emerging standards in agent technology to enhance interoperability, while supporting peculiarities of mobile agents. It also shows how this service may be customized to support a variety of message-based agent communication models.

New Technologies, Mobility and Security

An important goal in mobile agent technology is interoperability between various agent systems. A way of achieving this goal would be to envisage a standard to be imposed on these various "agents systems" in order to allow the inter-working of various architectures of mobile agents. During the past years, different scientific communities proposed to different standardization actions, such as the Foundation for Physical Intelligent Agents (FIPA) and the Object Management Group's MASIF (Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facilities). Although, they finally share some major targets, the OMG and FIPA current results show their distinct origins, particularly for interoperability between or within distributed systems. In this paper, we first analyze the similarities and differences, advantages and disadvantages of the Object Management Group (OMG) mobile agent and the Foundations for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) intelligent agent approaches. Based on this analysis, we try to integrate these two standards to propose an architectural model for mobile agents system interoperability.

2017

One of the major setback preventing the mobile agent technology from being widely exploited is a lack of interoperability between heterogeneous mobile agent systems. In this paper we propose a Java-based framework which enables high-level interoperability between Javabased mobile agent systems. The framework relies on an event-driven, proxy-based mobile agent model and allows for supporting interoperable mobile agents which can be easily coded and adapted to existing mobile agent systems without any modifications of their infrastructures. We tested our framework for enabling interoperability among the Aglets, Ajanta, Grasshopper and Voyager systems. The experimentation results showed that high efficacy is obtained by keeping the efficiency overhead acceptable for heterogeneous computing environments.

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.

Mobile Agent Technology (MAT) is a fresh paradigm for distributed programming, with potential for application in a broad range of fields . A Mobile Agent (MA) corresponds to a small program that is able to migrate to some remote machine, where it is able to execute some function or collect some relevant data and then migrate to other machines in order to accomplish another task. The basic idea of this paradigm is to distribute the processing throughout the network: that is, send the code to the data instead of bringing the data to the code. MA systems differ from other mobile code and agent-based technologies because increased code and state mobility allow for even more flexible and dynamic solutions.

1999

Abstract Interoperability is a central issue far both the mobile agents community and the wider agents community. Unfortunately, the interoperability concerns are different between the two communities. As a result, inter-agent communication is an issue that has been addressed in a limited manner by the mobile agents community.