Mobile Agents

The term agent comes from greek ‘agein’, which means to drive or to lead. Today the term agent denotes something that produces or is capable of producing an effect. It can be a chemically, physically or biologically active principle. With this broad scope the term agent can be used for substances (rinsing agent) as well as for human beings (travel agent). With its connotation of driving or leading something, the term is very suitable to describe current trends in computer science away from using the computer as a passive tool towards considering the computer as some more active instrument, in particular an instrument to which work can be delegated. Programming techniques and software that enable a more active role of the computer have been proposed in many different areas of computer science. To distinguish these agents from other types of agents, they are summarized under the term software agents.