Coordination in Mobile Agent Applications

The paper addresses the issue of coordination in distributed applications based on mobile agents. The presence of mobile active computational entities makes traditional coordination models based on message-passing, such as the client-server one, not effective, from both the performance and the usability points of view. Indirect coordination models suit better the mobile scenario: interactions occur via blackboards where information is accessed in an associative way, thus uncoupling the involved entities. The paper surveys these different approaches and evaluates their impact in the design of a widely distributed application in the area of information retrieval. This permits to outline the advantages of uncoupled coordination models and to point out the urge for a coordination model based on reactive and programmable blackboards, that may increase the safety and the security of the environment while simplifying the task of programming distributed mobile agent applications.