Mobile Agent Interoperability Revisited

A major setback for mobile agent technology is – apart from a frequently cited absence of appropriate security mechanisms – a lack of interoperability between systems for mobile agents, which prevents mobile agents from reaching " critical mass " for widespread application. Interoperability is required where systems of different vendors come into contact with each other. More precisely, two mobile agent systems are interoperable if a mobile agent of one system can migrate to the second system, the agent can interact and communicate with other agents on this system (or even remote agents), the agent can leave this system, and it can resume its execution on the next interoperable system. At the time of writing, we are aware of only one attempt to provide means of interoperability among systems of mobile agents, which is the dated MASIF proposal [1]. FIPA is also active in the standardization of agent mobility 1 issues , but this particular thread of FIPA's work focuses on a high level of abstraction , and, to the best of our knowledge, the document did not have much public scrutiny yet. It is therefore fair to say that these existing standardization efforts have not yet shown to be effective to provide actual interoperability among systems for mobile agents with regard to our definition. Rather than following the top down approach to interoperability by means of standards, we chose to take a bottom up approach based on voluntary and practical interoperability with other systems for mobile agents. In this vein, a working group was established in the Special Interest Group on Intelligent and Mobile Agents, which is part of AgentLink, 2 Europe's Network of Excellence for Agent-Based Computing. Current members of this working group are