Mobile Agent Technology for Enterprise Distributed Applications: An Overview and an Architectural Perspective

Mobile agents can be regarded as software components which can move from host to host to perform computations. Research over the past halfdecade has found the mobile agent paradigm to be useful for many applications. This paper aims to show the broad applicability of mobile agent technology in the enterprise, and to explore the implications of this broad applicability from an architectural perspective. It first provides an overview of mobile agent technology in three types of enterprise applications: intraorganizational, inter-organizational and customer-to-business, with focus on data management, distributed parallel processing, computer-supported collaborative work, virtual enterprises, and customer-facing systems. Then, a conceptual architecture is presented which integrates three areas in the development of mobile agent enterprise software: a mobile agent based enterprise applications suite and sub-suites, mobile agent middleware, and an enterprise-scale agent infrastructure.