A statecharts-based software development process for mobile agents

Although mobile agents and their supporting infrastructures have been extensively developed, it is still an emerging technology. A wider acceptance of mobile agents would be facilitated with the exploitation of suitable methodologies and tools which fully support their development lifecycle. This paper proposes a Statecharts-based development process for mobile agents, which allows for a seamless transition from the specification of mobile agent behaviour to its implementation and adaptation to target mobile agent systems. In particular, modelling of the mobile agent behaviour is visual and its coding is seamlessly supported by the Mobile Active Object Framework. The coded agent behaviour can be adapted to platform-specific mobile agents by means of the Mobile Agent Adaptation Framework thus enabling re-use of existing mobile agent systems. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.