Markus Straßer

Mole—concepts of a mobile agent system

Due to its salient properties, mobile agent technology has received a rapidly growing attention over the last few years. Many developments of mobile agent systems are under way in both academic and industrial environments. In addition, there are already various efforts to standardize mobile agent facilities and architectures. Mole is the first mobile agent system that has been developed in the Java language. The first version was finished in 1995, and since then Mole has been constantly improved. Mole provides a stable environment for the development and usage of mobile agents in the area of distributed applications. In this paper we describe the basic concepts of a mobile agent system, i.e., mobility, communication and security, discuss different implementation techniques, present the decisions made in Mole and give an overview of the system services implemented in Mole.

Communication Concepts for Mobile Agent Systems

Driven by the question how to identify potential communication partners and the need for well-suited communication schemes in agent-based systems, we discuss two communication concepts: sessions and global event management.

Mole 3.0: a middleware for Java-based mobile software agents

Mole is one of the first Java-based mobile agent systems. It runs on an unmodified Java virtual machine on PCs under Windows 95/NT and on workstations under several UNIX dialects. Earlier versions of Mole have provided a basic infrastructure for communication and migration of mobile agents. Version 3.0 of Mole has been strongly revised and several requests and proposals from users of the earlier versions of Mole were integrated into the new release. In particular Mole supports communication between agent groups and the concept of sessions. The infrastructure of Mole includes a resource manager, a directory service and a global naming scheme for agents. In order to support the design of agents, a graphical agent monitor allows to visualize the system behavior as a whole or of a single agent in particular. Mole further provides a thread management unit to overcome some shortcomings of the Java virtual machine. Mole provides a simple means for installation and configuration of the system. This paper describes the architecture and infrastructure of Mole 3.0.

Providing Reliable Agents for Electronic Commerce

It is widely agreed that mobile agents in conjunction with WWW technology will provide the technical foundation for future electronic commerce. A prerequisite for the use of mobile agents in a commercial environment is, that agents have to be executed reliable, independent of communication and node failure.

Java als Sprache für mobile Agenten (Java as a Language for Mobile Agents)

Mobile Agenten sind seit Jahren Gegenstand universitärer und industrieller Forschung. Der vorliegende Artikel stellt zuerst das Konzept der mobilen Agenten und ihre Anwendung vor. Danach werden eingehend die Eigenschaften von Mobile-Agenten-Systemen diskutiert, wobei besonderes Augenmerk auf die Eignung von Java für die Realisierung dieser Systeme gerichtet wird. Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt der Diskussion liegt auf der Realisierung der Mobilität der Agenten, welcher durch die Einführung von Reiseroutenkonzepten vertieft wird.