Persisting Autonomous Workflow for Mobile Agents Using a Mobile Thread Programming Model

In this paper, we present a Mobile Thread Programming Model (MTPM), a model to simulate the persistence of a migratory thread, to overcome the problem of coexistence of mobility, persistence and autonomy for mobile agents. An advantage of MTPM over other code mobility paradigms is that the model simulates strong mobility at the application-level rather than at the system-level as used in many strong mobility-supporting systems. It is runtime dependent to migrate threads at system-level. However, MTPM is constructed on Java Virtual Machine (JVM) by using Serialization and Remote Method Invocation (RMI), thus it is suitable to heterogeneous environments without introducing new spatial and time complexities in the implementation. Distributed Task Plan (DTP), which is detailed in this paper, is a flexible implementation model of MTPM used to simulate the persistence of an agent thread. Also, a DTP is embedded with navigational and computational autonomies, so that a mobile agent can obtain a continuous and autonomous workflow only by executing a DTP.