Mobile agent middleware for dependable distributed systems

A platform for enabling multiple agents to migrate between computers and be organized in a non-centralized manner. The platform introduces two unique notions for dynamic compositions and inter-agent interactions into mobile agent computing. The first enable an agent to contain other agents inside it and migrate to another agent or computer with its inner agents. It provides a powerful approach to composing and deploying large-scale mobile software. The second enable an agent to define its destination according to another agent´s location with several policies to support adaptation on distributed systems. It also introduces several higher-level coordinations between mobile agents, e.g., master-slave and redundancy, which are useful to implement distributed systems. This paper also describes a prototype implementation of the platform with mobile agent technology and several applications of it.