Mobile Agent

Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is the best-known framework for voluntary reporting of environmental and social performance by business worldwide. Using extensive empirical data, including interviews and documentary analysis, we examine GRI's organizational field and conclude that since its modest beginnings in 1999 GRI has been by several measures a successful institutionalization project. But the institutional logic of this new entity, as an instrument for corporate sustainability management, leaves out one of the central elements of the initial vision for GRI: as a mobilizing agent for many societal actors. This emergent logic reflects GRI's dominant constituency – large global companies and financial institutions and international business management consultancies – and not the less active civil society organizations and organized labor. We attribute these developments to factors such as building GRI within the existing institutional structures; the highly inclusive multistakeholder process; and the underdeveloped base of information users. From the institutional theory perspective, this case shows how the process of institutionalization is deeply affected by initial strategies of the founders, and how it reproduces existing power relations. From the governance perspective, this case leads us to question the power of commodified information to mobilize civil society and to strengthen governance based on partnerships.

1. ABSTRACT Agent technology is an emerging field and agent-based application design is still a pi o- neering discipline. We are all pioneers, i n- venting and re-inventing sometimes smart but perhaps more not-so-smart solutions to recur- rent problems. It is here that agent design pat- terns can help by capturing good solutions to common problems in agent design. No

The growing computational power requirements of grand challenge applications has promoted the need for linking highperformance computational resources distributed across multiple organisations. This is fueled by the availability of the Internet as a ubiquitous commodity communication media, low cost high-performance machines such as clusters across multiple organisations, and the rise of scientific problems of multi-organisational interest. The availability of expensive, special class of scientific instruments or devices and data sources in few organisations has increased the interest in offering a remote access to these resources. The recent popularity of coupling (local and remote) computational resources, special class of scientific instruments, and data sources across the Internet for solving problems has led to the emergence of a new platform called "Computational Grid". This paper identifies the issues in resource management and scheduling driven by computational economy in the emerging grid computing context. They also apply to clusters of clusters environment (known as federated clusters or hyperclusters) formed by coupling multiple (geographically distributed) clusters located in the same or different organisations. We discuss our current work on the Nimrod/G resource broker, whose scheduling mechanism is driven by a user supplied application deadline and a resource access budget. However, current Grid access frameworks do not provide the dynamic resource trading services that are required to facilitate flexible application scheduling. In order to overcome this limitation, we have proposed an infrastructure called GRid Architecture for Computational Economy (GRACE). In this paper we present the motivations for grid computing, resource management architecture, Nimrod/G resource broker, computational economy, and GRACE infrastructure and its APIs along with future work.

This paper proposes a language called CLAIM : Computational Language for Autonomous Intelligent and Mobile agents. CLAIM allows designing Multi-Agent Systems that support both stationary and mobile agents. Agents designed thanks to CLAIM are endowed with cognitive capabilities (e.g. reasoning), are able to communicate with other agents and are mobile. The primitives of mobility are inspired from the ambient calculus. The CLAIM language is supported by a multi-platform system (SyMPA) compliant with the specifications of the MASIF standard (from OMG);i.e. agents can be distributed over several sites and can move from one to another with respect to MASIF specifications. this paper presents the main features of our language CLAIM, resumes the most significant aspects of SyMPA, shows the expressiveness of our language, and discusses the completeness of the mobility.

A self-organising system functions without central control, and through contextual local interactions. Components achieve a simple task individually, but a complex collective behaviour emerges from their mutual interactions. Such a system modifies its structure and functionality to adapt to changes to requirements and to the environment based on previous experience. Nature provides examples of self-organisation, such as ants food foraging, molecules formation, or antibodies detection. Similarly, current software applications are driven by social interactions (negotiations, transactions), based on autonomous entities or agents, and run in highly dynamic environments. The issue of engineering applications, based on the principles of selforganisation to achieve robustness and adaptability, is gaining increasing interest in the software research community. The aim of this paper is to survey natural and artificial complex systems exhibiting emergent behaviour, and to outline the mechanisms enabling such behaviours. environment. Insects, such as ants, termites, or bees, mark their environment using a chemical volatile substance, called the pheromone, for example, as do ants to mark a food trail. Insects have simple behaviour, and none of them alone "knows" how to find food but their interaction gives rise to an organised society able to explore their environment, find food and efficiently inform the rest of the colony. The pheromonal information deposited by insects constitutes an indirect communication means through their environment.

Rapid growth and expansion of information and communication technology (ICT) have set the pace for an electronic revolution leading to adoption of e-marketplace within the small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Locally, this growth in ICT promises to further bolster the SMEs' position as the engine of growth for the Malaysia economy. However, there are various challenges and issues in setting up an e-marketplace in developing countries which appear to impede the growth of e-marketplace. In this paper, the realities of e-business adoption in Malaysian wood based products industry are discussed. This leads to the proposal of an integrated e-marketplace framework. This framework integrates different types of business mechanisms to facilitate in the trading of wood-based products in Malaysia. These mechanisms comprise of a third-party intermediary portal, mobile agent-based multi-attribute reverse auction and an e-negotiation feature that incorporates the use of the short messaging system service.

Cloud Computing is one of the latest
computing paradigms in IT sector today where
applications, platforms, software and some other IT
services are provided over the internet. It is also
known as On Demand Computing. Cloud
Computing considers shared pool of configurable
computing resources which requires proper resource
distribution among the tasks, otherwise in some
situations resources may over-utilized or underutilized.
For the sake of efficient resource
utilization, Load Balancing System problem needs
more attention in cloud computing. In This paper,
we have used Agent Based Dynamic Load
Balancing (ABDLB) approach in which mobile
agent plays very important role, which is a software
entity and usually defined as an independent
software program that runs on behalf of a network
administrator. It has ability to learn. After
comparing the proposed method with traditional
load balancing scheme we concluded that Agent
Base load balancing scheme greatly reduces the
communication cost of servers, accelerates the rate
of load balancing which indirectly improves the
Throughput and Response Time of the cloud.

The problem of computing a route for a mobile agent that incrementally fuses the data as it visits the nodes in a distributed sensor network is considered. The order of nodes visited along the route has a significant impact on the quality and cost of fused data, which, in turn, impacts the main objective of the sensor network, such as target classification or tracking. We present a simplified analytical model for a distributed sensor network and formulate the route computation problem in terms of maximizing an objective function, which is directly proportional to the received signal strength and inversely proportional to the path loss and energy consumption. We show this problem to be NP-complete and propose a genetic algorithm to compute an approximate solution by suitably employing a two-level encoding scheme and genetic operators tailored to the objective function. We present simulation results for networks with different node sizes and sensor distributions, which demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm over two existing heuristics, namely, local closest first and global closest first methods.

Berbagai penyebab memungkinkan terjadinya masalah pada server tunggal, sehingga perlu dipertimbangkan untuk menggunakan backup server. Backup server berisi data yang sama dengan data dari server utama. Hal tersebut dapat dilakukan dengan cara mensinkronkan file secara berkala. Dalam studi ini, sinkronisasi file diwujudkan menggunakan Aglets. Aglets merupakan framework mobile agent dengan kemampuan berpindah dan melakukan tugas sesuai keinginan. Hasil pengujian menunjukkan sinkronisasi berjalan dengan baik menggunakan prinsip mobile agent.

Gupta, Whitman, and Agarwal straints such as capacity constraints and flow constraints between each node. They used linear programming to op-timize the objective function that includes 134 decision variables and 142 constraints. This study considers only a deterministic case. ...

This paper deals with the application of Kalman Filtering (KF) techniques to the localization of a swarm of mobile agents in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). In particular, both Extended (EKF) and Unscented (UKF) Kalman filters have been investigated referring to a typical urban scenario with energetic and resource constraints. A cooperation strategy among sensor nodes, based on a virtual diversity scheme, has been introduced allowing the swarm tracking under severe propagation conditions. The effectiveness of the proposed solution has been assessed by means of simulations concerning a squad of robots moving in realistic scenarios. It has been shown that UKF achieves a higher accuracy and reliability than EKF in localizing the barycenter of the robot squad. Further, the proposed solution provides advantages in terms of measurement update frequency and, hence, of energy saving.

Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET) is highly vulnerable to attacks due to the open medium dynamically changing network topology, cooperative algorithm, lack of centralized monitoring and management point. The fact that security is a critical problem when implementing mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is widely acknowledged. One of the different kinds of misbehavior a node may exhibit is selfishness. Routing protocol plays a crucial role for effective communication between mobile nodes and operates on the basic assumption that nodes are fully cooperative. Because of open structure and limited battery-based energy some nodes (i.e. selfish or malicious) may not cooperate correctly. There can be two types of selfish attacks –selfish node attack (saving own resources) and sleep deprivation (exhaust others' resources. In this paper, we propose a new Intrusion Detection System (IDS) based on Mobile Agents. The approach uses a set of Mobile Agent (MA) that can move from one node to another node within a network. This as a whole reduces network bandwidth consumption by moving the computation for data analysis to the location of the intrusion. Besides, it has been established that the proposed method also decreases the computation overhead in each node in the network.

We describe the deployment of mobile agent in Distributed Sensor Networks (DSNs) to form an improved infrastructure for multisensor data fusion. Compared with the traditional client/server paradigm, mobile agent adopts a new computing model: data stay at the local site, while the execution code is moved to the data sites. Mobile-agent-based DSN (MADSN) saves the network bandwidth and provides an effective way to overcome network latency. It is used to integrate preprocessed data located at local sensor nodes. Progressive accuracy can be achieve during the agent migration. We take target classification as an example to show how MADSN supports high performance distributed integration.

There is a strong correlation between the human immune system and a computer network security system. The human immune system protects the human body from pathogenic elements in the same way that a computer security system protects the computer from malicious users. This paper presents a novel intrusion detection model based on artificial immune and mobile agent paradigms for network intrusion detection. The construction of the model is based on registries' signature analysis using both Syslog-ng and Logcheck unix tools. The tasks of monitoring, distributing intrusion detection workload, storing relevant information, and ensuring data persistence and reactivity have been carried out by the mobile agents, which represent the leukocytes of an artificial immune system. Our real-time based intrusion detection and communication model is host-based and adopts the anomaly detection paradigm. We present our intrusion detection model, discuss its implementation, and report on its performance evaluation using real data provided by an Internet Service Provider and a data processing corporation. Ó 2007 Published by Elsevier B.V.

We introduce a calculus for mobile agents and give its chemical semantics, with a precise de nition for migration, failure, and failure detection. Various examples written in our calculus illustrate how to express remote executions, dynamic loading of remote resources and protocols with mobile agents. We give the encoding of our distributed calculus into the join-calculus.

The MonALISA (Monitoring Agents in a Large Integrated Services Architecture) framework provides aset of distributed services for monitoring, control, management and global optimization for large scaledistributed systems. It is based on an ensemble of autonomous, multi-threaded, agent-based subsystemswhich are registered as dynamic services. They can be automatically discovered and used by otherservices or clients. The distributed agents can collaborate and cooperate in performing a wide rangeof management, control and global optimization tasks using real time monitoring information.

Most current IDS are generally centralized and suffer from significant limitations when used in high speed networks, especially when they face distributed attacks. This paper shows that the use of mobile agents has practical ad- vantages for intrusion detection. For this purpose we carried out a comparative experimental study of some IDS, showing their limits and then we propose an implementation of a new MAFIDS (Mobile Agent for Intrusion Detection System) model focusing on misuse approach. The performance of MAFIDS is investigated in terms of detection delay, false alarm and detection rate by comparing it to a centralized IDS over real traffic and a set of simulated attacks.

This paper presents a mobile-agent and OSGi based three-tier control system architecture for smart home. In the OSGi platform of home gateway, UPnP technology and intelligent agent technology works together to achieve automation of devices discovery, registry, and management. By means of OSGi middleware and mobile agent technology, the proposed hierarchical architecture supports remote devices control and fault diagnosis, dynamic service provisioning, flexible system performance management, integration of heterogeneous devices, and agent-based distributed control.

This paper presents theoretical and experimental results on bilateral teleoperation of multiple mobile slave agents coupled to a single master robot. We first design a passifying proportional-derivative (PD) controller to enforce motion tracking and formation control of master and slave vehicles under constant, bounded communication delays. Then, we incorporate avoidance functions to guarantee collision-free transit through obstructed spaces. The unified control framework is validated by experiments with two coaxial helicopters as slave agents and a haptic device as the master robot.

In this paper a technique for intrusion detection in MANET has been proposed where agents are fired from a node which traverses each node randomly and detect the malicious node. Detection is based on triangular encryption technique (TE) where AODV is taken as routing protocol. For simulation we have taken NS2 (2.33) where two type of parameters are considered out of which number of nodes and percentage of node mobility are the attributes. For analysis purpose 20, 30, 30, 40, 50 and 60 nodes are taken with a variable percentage of malicious node as 0 %( no malicious), 10%, 20%, 30% and 40%. Analysis have been done taking generated packets, forwarded packets, delay, and average delay as parameters

Eighth Scandinavian Conference on Artificial Intelligence 153 B. Tessem et al.(Eds.) IOS Press. 2003 Scalable Agent-Based Simulation of Players in Massively Multiplayer Online Games Amund Tveit 0yvind Rein J0rgen V. Iversen Mihhail Matskin Department of Computer and ...

Service personalization is an important goal for any smart environment. Comfort systems may be adjusted in an automatic way when a given user is present, and multimedia devices may offer a music or movie catalog with favorite contents or may even pick one of them for the user. To achieve this goal, we propose a Service Oriented Architecture implementation based on multiagent systems. We specially take advantage of the mobility features of software agents. In particular, we have developed a hierarchical, agent-based solution intended to be applicable to different smart space scenarios, ranging from small environments, like smart homes or smart offices, to large smart spaces like cities. In this paper we describe the global architecture and focus on our approach to service personalization using mobile agents that follow the users as they move through different smart spaces.

Rapid growth and expansion of information and communication technology (ICT) have set the pace for an electronic revolution leading to adoption of e-marketplace within the small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Locally, this growth in ICT promises to further bolster the SMEs' position as the engine of growth for the Malaysia economy. However, there are various challenges and issues in setting up an e-marketplace in developing countries which appear to impede the growth of e-marketplace. In this paper, the realities of e-business adoption in Malaysian wood based products industry are discussed. This leads to the proposal of an integrated e-marketplace framework. This framework integrates different types of business mechanisms to facilitate in the trading of wood-based products in Malaysia. These mechanisms comprise of a third-party intermediary portal, mobile agent-based multi-attribute reverse auction and an e-negotiation feature that incorporates the use of the short messaging system service.

In this paper, we discuss operational and security issues arising from the use of mobile components in distributed systems. We argue that mobile agents can be used to overcome intrinsic problems of wireless networking. We define the operational model of our mobile computing environment, where we plan to demonstrate our proposed solutions. We also discuss security problems and mechanisms that can be applied to each one of the three main components of our mobile computing model, which is intended to be implemented in a health care paradigm, where special conditions and emergency needs are imposing the use of services supported with mobile computing.

Distributed network management (NM) architectures exploiting the advantages of mobile agents (MA) promise to relieve some of the limitations intrinsic to client-server based centralised NM, such as lack of scalability, interoperability and flexibility. However, the use of MAs alone could impose an unnecessary transmission overhead if mobile code were to be used for trivial tasks. Hence, an infrastructure based on a hybridisation of centralised and distributed approaches is proposed, which maintains the lightweight nature of centralised NM for trivial management tasks, whilst adopting a distributed MA-based scheme as task complexity and suitability changes. Remote processing and compression of NM data issues are investigated in order to reduce the bandwidth usage. Security enhancements are also considered.

In this study, a Virtual Learning System that integrates Virtual Classroom and Virtual Laboratory services is presented. The Virtual Classroom represents an interface between the students and a virtual professor and provides personalized learning materials to the users. The Virtual Laboratory offers a possibility to the attendees to share different resources at once and work with them as if they

We demonstrate interoperable mobile agents to integrate Internet of Things and wireless sensor networks with resource-constrained low-power embedded networked devices. We introduce adaptable composition for the mobile agent, complying with the Representational State Transfer principles, which are then used for agent migration, controlling the agent and exposing the data, system resources, tasks and services, to the Web. We gather requirements for the system and heterogeneous networked devices and present an application programming interface to enable mobile agents in these systems. The agents are demonstrated in a real-world prototype with smartphones and embedded networked devices, where we utilize a proxy component to expose system resources to the Web for human-machine interactions. Spanning over disparate networks and protocols, the proxy translates messages including the agent composition, between HTTP and Constrained Application Protocol. Lastly, we suggest an evaluation method for the agent communication and migration costs, considering the different types of system resources and utilization.

New technologies are required to face new scenarios due to the fast spread of the Internet. The paper surveys the current trends of the emerging mobile agent technology. In a high-connected world, agents are the active entities, which roam across network nodes on behalf of their senders. We show some applications that can take advantages from the mobile agent approach. The paper presents the relevant aspects of coordination and security, which are currently discussed in the mobile agent community, pointing out open research directions.

H ealthcare is information driven and knowledge driven. Good healthcare depends on making decisions at the right time and place, using the right patient data and applicable knowledge. Communication is of utmost relevance in today's healthcare settings, in that delivery of care, research, and management all depend on sharing information.

The Web-based education and E-Learning has become a very important branch of new educational technology. E-learning and Web-based courses offer advantages for learners by making access to resources and learning objects very fast, just-in-time and relevance, at any time or place. Web based Learning Management Systems should focus on how to satisfy the e-learners needs and it may advise a learner with most suitable resources and learning objects. But Because of many limitations using web 2.0 for creating E-learning management system, now-a-days we use Web 3.0 which is known as Semantic web. It is a platform to represent E-learning management system that recovers the limitations of Web 2.0.In this paper we present “improve information retrieval and e-learning using mobile agent based on semantic web technology”. This paper focuses on design and implementation of knowledge-based industrial reusable, interactive, web-based training activities at the sea ports and logistics sector and use e-learning system and semantic web to deliver the learning objects to learners in an interactive, adaptive and flexible manner. We use semantic web and mobile agent to improve Library and courses Search. The architecture presented in this paper is considered an adaptation model that converts from syntactic search to semantic search. We apply the training at Damietta port in Egypt as a real-world case study. we present one of possible applications of mobile agent technology based on semantic web to management of Web Services, this model improve the information retrieval and E-learning system.

Agent-based modeling has been recognized as a method to bridge the translational gap in integrative systems biology. However, the computational complexity of agent-based models at biologically relevant scales makes simulation impractical on traditional CPU-based serial computing. In this paper we present a series of algorithms for simulating large scale agent-based models on graphics processing units (GPUs). GPUs have recently emerged as a powerful and economical computing platform for certain applications in scientific computing. As a test case, we have implemented an agent-based model of tuberculosis. This model simulates the interaction of the human immune system in the lung with Mycobacterium Tuberculosis and tracks the formation of characteristic structure called garnulomas. The model represents immune cells such as T-Cells and Macrophages using mobile agents, effector chemokines using field equations, and bacteria. Our implementation is is two orders of magnitude larger and runs three orders of magnitude faster than the original CPU-based implementation.

We apply a novel motion planning and control methodology, which is based on a non-smooth navigation function, to a point mobile robot moving amongst moving obstacles. The chattering introduced by the discontinuous potential field is suppressed using nonsmooth backstepping. The combined controller guarantees global asymptotic convergence and collision avoidance. This controller is particularly suitable for real time implementation on systems with limited computational resources. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified through computer simulations.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are emerging as powerful platforms for distributed embedded computing supporting a variety of high-impact applications. However programming WSN applications is a complex task which requires suitable paradigms and technologies ...

We present a surveillance system that uses audio and video sensors to reveal and track the presence of an intruder in a off-limit area. The system is composed of a mobile agent and several static agents cooperating in the tracking task. The mobile agent is a vision agent composed of an omnidirectional vision system and a mobile robot. The mobile agents greatly increase the flexibility of the surveillance system with respect to traditional surveillance systems, e.g. the mobile robot can "go and seek" for intruders in areas occluded to the monitoring system or it can patrol areas outside of the field of view of the fix sensory agents. The static agents are acoustic agents composed of self-steerable microphone arrays and a vision agent implemented on a omnidirectional vision system. In this paper, the integration of pre-existing blocks is presented and preliminary tests on the system are reported 1 Introduction

In the 1940s, two different views of the brain and the computer were equally important. One was the analog technology and theory that had emerged before the war. The other was the digital technology and theory that was to become the main paradigm of computation. 1 The outcome of the contest between these two competing views derived from technological and epistemological arguments. While digital technology was improving dramatically, the technology of analog machines had already reached a significant level of development. In particular, digital technology offered a more effective way to control the precision of calculations. But the epistemological discussion was, at the time, equally relevant. For the supporters of the analog computer, the digital model -which can only process information transformed and coded in binary -wouldn't be suitable to represent certain kinds of continuous variation that help determine brain functions. With analog machines, on the contrary, there would be few or no layers between natural objects and the work and structure of computation (cf. [4, 1]). The 1942-52 Macy Conferences in cybernetics helped to validate digital theory and logic as legitimate ways to think about the brain and the machine [4]. In particular, those conferences helped made McCulloch-Pitts' digital model of the brain [3] a very influential paradigm. The descriptive strength of McCulloch-Pitts model led von Neumann, among others, to seek identities between the brain and specific kinds of electrical circuitry [1].

In this paper, we develop an energy-efficient, fault-tolerant approach for collaborative signal and information processing (CSIP) among multiple sensor nodes using a mobile-agent-based computing model. In this model, instead of each sensor node sending local information to a processing center for integration, as is typical in client/server-based computing, the integration code is moved to the sensor nodes through mobile agents. The energy efficiency objective and the fault tolerance objective always conflict with each other and present unique challenge to the design of CSIP algorithms. In general, energy-efficient approaches try to limit the redundancy in the algorithm so that minimum amount of energy is required for fulfilling a certain task. On the other hand, redundancy is needed for providing fault tolerance since sensors might be faulty, malfunctioning, or even malicious. A balance has to be struck between these two objectives. We discuss the potential of mobile-agent-based collaborative processing in providing progressive accuracy while maintaining certain degree of fault tolerance. We evaluate its performance compared to the client/server-based collaboration from perspectives of energy consumption and execution time through both simulation and analytical study. Finally, we take collaborative target classification as an application example to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Social insects provide us with a powerful metaphor to create decentralized systems of simple interacting, and often mobile, agents. The emergent collective intelligence of social insects -swarm intelligence -resides not in complex individual abilities but rather in networks of interactions that exist among individuals and between individuals and their environment. The study of ant colonies behavior and of their self-organizing capabilities is of interest to knowledge retrieval/ management and decision support systems sciences, because it provides models of distributed adaptive organization which are useful to solve difficult optimization, classification, and distributed control problems, among others. In the present work we overview some models derived from the observation of real ants, emphasizing the role played by stigmergy as distributed communication paradigm, and we present a novel strategy (ACLUSTER) to tackle unsupervised data exploratory analysis as well as data retrieval problems. Moreover and according to our knowledge, this is also the first application of ant systems into digital image retrieval problems. Nevertheless, the present algorithm could be applied to any type of numeric data.

The feasibility of a two-step treatment process has been assessed at laboratory scale for the remediation of soil contaminated with a model mixture of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) (phenanthrene, pyrene, and fluoranthene). The initial step of the process involved contacting contaminated soil with thermoplastic, polymeric pellets (polyurethane). The ability of three different mobilizing agents (water, surfactant (Biosolve) and isopropyl alcohol) to enhance recovery of PAHs from soil was investigated and the results were compared to the recovery of PAHs from dry soil. The presence of isopropyl alcohol had the greatest impact on PAH recovery with approximately 80% of the original mass of PAHs in the soil being absorbed by the polymer pellets in 48 h. The second stage of the suggested treatment involved regeneration of the PAH loaded polymers via PAH biodegradation, which was carried out in a solid-liquid two-phase partitioning bioreactor. In addition to the PAH containing polymer pellets, the bioreactor contained a microbial consortium that was pre-selected for its ability to degrade the model PAHs and after a 14 d period approximately 78%, 62% and 36% of phenanthrene, pyrene, and fluoranthene, respectively, had been desorbed from the polymer and degraded. The rate of phenanthrene degradation was shown to be limited by mass transfer of phenanthrene from the polymer pellets. In case of pyrene and fluoranthene a combination of mass transfer and biodegradation rate might have been limiting.

The new network management scenario has larger and more complex infrastructures to manage and requires more elaborated applications to cope with its inherent complexity. Decentralized Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is a possible technology solution for the scalability problems presented by the traditional server-centric applications. However, the implementation of distributed architectures is a complex task and carries problems by its own. In this paper, we will present the current results from our researches on the application of two of most innovative distributed system architectures for network management system: grids of agents and mobile agents. The experiments argument in favor of using DAI for network management system and provide architectural and performance reference for future developments.

Traffic analysis of a network is a critical issue in today's fast changing network environment. A network-dependent itinerary is often needed for a mobile agent to travel to multiple hosts and/or destinations efficiently. In this paper, an optimal migration scheme for mobile agent routing in a data communication network was aimed. The routing model was presented as a Chinese Postman Problem (CPP). Combinatorial Optimization was applied to provide all possible itineraries and to compute an optimal path for mobile agents. Look-ahead algorithm was used to determine the link or node availability. The results showed that the proposed model minimizes the network latency and the throughput and thereby improves the mobility properties of mobile agents in a data communication network. It was concluded that the proposed migration scheme for mobile agents routing in a network can be adapted by the mobile agent software developers and network administrators for more effective network management.

Rapid growth of available geospatial data requires a development of system capable of autonomous data retrieval, integration and validation. Since agent technology may provide the suitable framework for developing such a system (as it can deal in a natural way with the distributed heterogeneous nature of the data) a problem of selection of the most appropriate agent environment needs to be addressed. In this paper, four mobile agent systems (Aglets, Concordia, Grasshopper, Voyager) are compared from the perspective of their suitability for this project.

In this paper we propose to pave indoor floors with "communicating" tiles in order to extend perception and communication of mobile agents and more generally to implement environment-based multi-agent models. Each tile supports a real-time process which ensures communication with its neighbours and any agent laid on it. We details algorithms required for tiles to interact with mobile agents and to carry out distributed processes. Then we apply our approach to a behavior-based model, by splitting the model into the tiles and a simple agent. We show this new version is equivalent to the original one and so discuss its advantages.

Military and domestic security analysts and planners are facing threats whose asymmetric nature will sharply increase the challenges of establishing an adversary's intent. This complex environment will severely limit the capabilities of the classic doctrinal approach to diagnose adversary activity. Instead, a more dynamic approach is required -adversary decision modeling (ADM) -that, while a critical capability, poses a range of daunting technological challenges. We are developing methodologies and tools that represent a tractable approach to ADM using intelligent software-based analysis of adversarial intent. In this paper we present work being performed by our team (University of Connecticut, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, and the Air Force Research Laboratory Human Effectiveness Directorate) toward a preliminary composite theory of adversary intent and its descriptive models, to provide a coherent conceptual foundation for addressing adversary decision processes, tasks, and functions. We then introduce notional computational models that, given own systemof-systems actions (movements and activities) and observations of an adversary's actions and reactions, automatically generate hypotheses about the adversary's intent. We present a preliminary software architecture that implements the model with: (1) intelligent mobile agents to rapidly and autonomously collect information, (2) information fusion technologies to generate higher-level evidence, and (3) our Intent Inference engine that models interests, preferences, and context.

In this paper we address the problem of synthesizing simple rules and local interactions at the individual level so that pre-specified complex behavior emerges at the group level of a collection of autonomous mobile agents. Usually, the emergent collective behavior is used to perform certain spatial group-tasks. Specifically, we consider self-assembling of a group of mobile robots into grid, line, and wedge patterns. We introduce the notion of local-templates in which each mobile agent – capable of simple forward/backward movements and a clock-wise/counter clock-wise spin – actively encodes distinctive information into multiple non-overlapping sectorial regions of the surrounding environment in order to form pose-specific virtual links with similar minimalist agents in a local neighborhood. The resulting local patterns around each agent lead to the desired global formation. In order to take mobile robots closer to their biological counterparts, there is a need to further simplify the manner in which they currently perceive their surroundings, communicate with their neighbors, and compute their actions. We have built a robotic platform consisting of four wheeled-mobile robots that are christened as Kinbots. They are similar in principle to Braitenberg Vehicles and use simple perception/interaction/actuation techniques to achieve individual vehicle complexity and produce effective group behavior through cooperation. To validate the proposed approach, we demonstrate a column-formation task in computer simulations and physical experiments. We illustrate an experiment which is representative of various prominent stages in a group-formation task such as formation-achievement, maintenance, and response of formation movement to the presence of obstacles.

The development of distributed systems has been affected by the need to accommodate an increasing degree of flexibility, adaptability, and autonomy. The Mobile Agent technology is emerging as an alternative to build a smart generation of highly distributed systems. In this work, we investigate the performance aspect of agent-based technologies for information retrieval. We present a comparative performance evaluation model of Mobile Agents versus Remote Method Invocation by means of an analytical approach. We demonstrate the effectiveness of mobile agents for dynamic code deployment and remote data processing by reducing total latency and at the same time producing minimum network traffic. We argue that exploiting agent-based technologies significantly enhances the performance of distributed systems in the domain of information retrieval.