Formulation of Mobile Agent Allocation and its Strong NP-Completeness

We formally define the mobile agent allocation problem from a system-wide viewpoint and then prove that it is strongly NPcomplete even if each agent communicates only with two agents. This is the first formal definition for scheduling mobile agents from the viewpoint of load balancing, which enables us to discuss its properties on a rigorous basis. The problem is recognized as preemptive scheduling with independent tasks that require mutual communication. The result implies that almost all subproblems of mobile agent allocation, which require mutual communication of agents, are strongly NP-complete. key words: strong NP-completeness, mobile agents, communication cost, subgraph isomorphism, load balancing