Mobile Agent Systems: From Technology To Applications

Over the last couple of years we have been working on the development of mobile agents systems and its application to the areas of telecommunications and network management. This work path produced positive results: a competitive mobile agent platform was built, the run-time benefits of mobile agents were proved, and our industrial partners have developed practical applications that are being integrated into commercial products. However, despite the positive results, we feel that mobile agent technology is still not ready to enter the path of mainstream software development. This is the reason why this technology has not yet gain large acceptance by the developers of real applications, despite the large number of interesting experiences already available. In our perspective, one of the main reasons for this situation arises from the traditional approach to mobile agent technology. This approach, based on the familiar concept of mobile agent distributed platforms as extensions of the operating system, focuses too much on mobile agents and associated issues (mobility, agent lifecycle, security, coordination, etc.) and provides poor support for the development of applications where mobile agents are just one of several available technologies. Learning from past experience, we are now working on a new approach where the focus is brought back to the applications and mobile agents become just one the tools available to develop distributed systems. This provides a much lighter framework for application-based mobile agents This paper presents the lessons learned from our previous project and discusses this new concept we are developing: application-centric mobile agent systems.