A Mobile Agent Based Registration System

A mobile agent is a software agent that has the ability to transfer its program code, data and execution state across a network to a remote computer for execution. In this paper, we present the design and development of a mobile agent based registration system (MARS) for subject registration in an academic environment. MARS is written in Java. Its mobile agent platform is provided by Aglets from IBM. The mobile agents, representing the students and administrators, are dispatched to a remote server for subject registration. Subject registration is conducted via bidding to allow prioritization of student choices. Bidding exploits the mobile agents’ intelligence in decision making based on environmental conditions. Comparisons between a traditional web based system and MARS show that the mobile agent approach has the advantages of disconnected computing, reduced network communication overhead, dynamic adaptation to changes and robustness.