Murhimanya Muhugusa

A survey of theories for mobile agents

This paper presents a comparative survey of formalisms related to mobile agents. It describes the π-calculus and its extensions, the Ambient calculus, Petri nets, Actors, and the family of generative communication languages. Each of these formalisms defines a mathematical framework that can be used to reason about mobile code; they vary greatly in their expressiveness, in the mechanisms they provide to specify mobile code based applications and in their practical usefulness for the validation and the verification of such applications. In this paper we show how these formalisms can be used to represent the mobility and communication aspects of two mobile code environments: Obliq and Messengers. We compare and classify the different formalisms with respect to mobility and discuss some shortcomings and desirable extensions. We also point to other emerging concepts in formalisms for mobile code systems.