This paper presents a new framework for constructing mobile agents. The framework introduces the notion of agent hierarchy and inter-agent migration and thus allows a group of mobile agents to be dynamically assembled into a single mobile agent. It provides a powerful method to construct a distributed application, in particular a large-scale mobile application. To demonstrate how to exploit our...

Innovations in network and information technology have transformed traditional classroom lectures into new approaches that have given universities the opportunity to create a virtual laboratory. However, there is no systematic framework in existing approaches for the development of virtual laboratories. Further, developing a virtual laboratory from scratch is time consuming and costly. This art...

The autonomous capabilities of Internet mobile agents are one of their great attractions, yet leave them at the mercy of ill-intending agent platforms. We have devised an infrastructural strategy that allows mobile agent users to delegate responsibility to a trusted third party for the safe management of mobile agents they deploy onto the Internet. Our infrastructural approach is based on a Mob...

Background: One of the ways for effective communication between learners and instructional multimedia content in mobile learning systems is taking advantage of characters or pedagogical agents. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of the levels of realism in mobile-based pedagogical agents on health e-learning. Methods: The s...

In this paper, a novel formalized finite state mobile agent computation model based on the virtual organization is presented. In this model, all the actions (e.g. service, migration and communication etc.) of the mobile agents are treated as states. The process of the mobile agents’ workflow is controlled by a finite-state-machine. This ensures the atomic action for each mobile agent to avoid t...

Mobile agent systems provide new perspectives for distributed e-commerce applications. These applications may present specific restrictions, making mobile agent systems a feasible solution. Even so, mobile agents present some security related problems. An important one is resource access control. The ability for mobile agents to provide a simple, scalable, flexible, and secure access control sy...

With ever growing use of Internet for electronic commerce and data mining type applications there seems to be a need for new network computing paradigms that can overcome the barriers posed by network congestion and unreliability. Mobile agent programming is a paradigm that enables the programs to move from one host to another, do the processing locally and return results asynchronously. In thi...

Over the last couple of years we have been working on the development of mobile agents systems and its application to the areas of telecommunications and network management. This work path produced positive results: a competitive mobile agent platform was built, the run-time benefits of mobile agents were proved, and our industrial partners have developed practical applications that are being i...

Mobile agents have been proposed as a solution to problems in ecommerce, telecommunications, and many other application domains. However, the mobile agent computing paradigm raises a number of security-related concerns, which have limited their industrial deployment. Mobile agent security issues include: identification, secure messaging, resource access and control, certification and non-repudi...