A Design Model for Intelligent Mobile Agent Software Systems

One of the grand challenges to achieving wide spread use and rapid development of multi-agent systems is to adapt principles of software engineering. Agent-oriented software provides a new software engineering paradigm and the opportunities for development of new domain-specific software models. With the continuing improvement of agent technology, and the rapid growth of software system complexity, especially for Internet applications, there is a pressing need for general models of mobile agents – models that explicitly support the features of mobility, cooperative behavior, and intelligence. We present a design model for intelligent mobile agent software by introducing mobility into a framework for agent-oriented software. The model facilitates design reuse by providing an inheritance mechanism and explicitly supports asynchronous message passing. The approach benefits from a formal foundation that is based on the agentoriented G-net formalism, a formalism derived from an object-based Petri net model. Thus the approach supports model analysis and property verification.