Active State Space: a Distributed Supporting Environment for Autonomous Mobile Agents

Agents have to be both autonomous and mobile in many WWW applications such as mobile computing. In this paper, we present ASS (Active State Space), a model of distributed supporting environments for autonomous mobile agents. We use ASS as a mediate media, which maps heterogeneous resources and knowledge representations into homogeneous virtual resources. In this manner, ASS is able to deal with heterogeneity and dynamicity of Internet. For supporting autonomies of mobile agents, ASS decouples the rigid and complex protocol, usually used in agent communications, into simple, fast and local accesses to ASS spaces by providing a unified interface for facilitat ing interactions of both inter-agents and agent-hosting execution environments. In the context of autonomy, asynchronous, anonymous and fully local interactions among mobile agents can be obtained by exchanging messages with ASS. We can use autonomous, lightweight and mobile agents and simple interaction protocols to construct WWW applications on unified ASS regardless of the heterogeneity and dynamicity of multiple platforms. A prototype of ASS has been implemented in Java as a component of a mobile agent system MAT (Mobile Agent Template). This paper also presents a case study of distributed information retrieval. The case tests interactions among mobile agents, which evaluates the effectiveness of ASS for supporting executions of autonomous workflow of mobile agents.