Transportable Information Agents Transportable Information Agents

We have designed and implemented autonomous software agents. Autonomous software agents navigate independently through a heterogeneous network. They are capable of sensing the network con guration, monitoring software conditions, and interacting with other agents. Autonomous agents are implemented as transportable programs, e.g., programs that are capable of suspending execution, moving to a di erent machine, and starting from where they left o . We illustrate the intelligent behavior of autonomous agents in the context of distributed information-gathering tasks. Areas: software agents, multi-agent systems Abstract ID A703 Word Count: 6,521 Multiple submissions: This paper has not been submitted elsewhere. Acknowledgments: The authors gratefully acknowledge Professor George Cybenko, who is the other third of the Agent Tcl project and has provided constant guidance, feedback and support; Ting Cai, who implemented the mobile computing services; Dawn Lawrie, who implemented the virtual yellow pages; Katya Pelekhov, who implemented the Smart interface for the information retrieval application; Bob Sproull from Sun Microsystems, who has taken part in extensive discussion; and the Air Force and Navy, who have provided generous nancial support (AFOSR F49620-93-1-0266 and ONR N00014-95-1-1204).