Implementation of self-backup mechanism and inter-agent communication for strong migration mobile agent system

The authors have been developing a strong migration mobile agent system in Java. Using the system, we are developing the platform of an autonomic distributed processing system, called AgentSphere. In this research, a mechanism so that an agent can create a backup of itself which includes data in the middle of execution is implemented. In order to use this mechanism, a user describes backup commands in the agent´s code. The backed-up agent is sent into other AgentSphere. And when an original agent stops according to an unexpected situation, the backed-up agent will start its activity instead of original one in order to resume its processing. Moreover, the method to insert backup commands automatically in suitable positions of an agent´s code is proposed. Furthermore, this paper also describes the implementation of a scheduler which performs initial distribution of agents and the communication functions between agents in AgentSphere.