MAP: Design and implementation of a mobile agents' platform

The recent development of telecommunication networks has contributed to the success of applications such as information retrieval and electronic commerce, as well as all the services that take advantage of communication in distributed systems. In this area, the emerging technology of mobile agents aroused considerable interest. Mobile agents are applications that can move through the network for carrying out a given task on behalf of the user. In this work we present a platform (called MAP (Mobile Agents Platform)) for the development and the management of mobile agents. The language used both for developing the platform and for carrying out the agents is Java. The platform gives the user all the basic tools needed for creating some applications based on the use of agents. It enables us to create, run, suspend, resume, deactivate, reactivate local agents, to stop their execution, to make them communicate each other and migrate.