Introduction to Mobile Agent Systems and Applications

This tutorial will provide an in-depth look at mobile agents and their application in modern networked computing. Mobile agents/code will be compared and contrasted with traditional client-server based tool such as CORBA. Design patterns for developing mobile agent applications will be presented. Several existing mobile agent frameworks will be discussed, including Aglets (IBM), Voyager (ObjectSpace) and Hive (MIT). Code samples of actual agent implementations will be presented in Java using these frameworks. Custom implementations of mobile agents systems using Java’s RMI (remote method invocation), Jini, and JavaSpaces will also be shown. Finally, several applications of mobile agent systems, including a distributed workflow management system and a distributed information retrieval system, will be discussed in detail.