E-Life: Software Mobile Agent

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E-Life Software Mobile Agent

• Freeman Huang
• Supervisor Dr. David Skillicon

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Background-1 distributed computing

• Computer network
• Message passing
• Remote Procedure Call
• client/server architecture
• Object invocation RMI, CORBA

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Challenges Resource limitation heterogeneity Scal
ability
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Background-2 artificial intelligence

• Computing entities that can
• Observe the environment
• Reason about the goings-on
• Make decisions
• React
• Take over work from human user

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The ideas

• How about a program with
• Loyalty perform computation on behalf of the
  user who creates it
• Mobility transport itself from host to host
  within a network then resume execution
• Autonomy settle, execute and move independently
  without supervision
• Intelligence learn from what it gets and make
  decisions, e.g. next move
• Recursion create child agents for subtasks
• Asynchrony

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Infrastructure for Mobile Agent

• Agents programs that can move carrying its
• attributes, state, code
• Agent runtime environment
• communication naming mechanism
• resource management
• security
• Resources
• CPU cycles, memory, disk space
• services (database, www data, etc.)
• Protocols timing, syntax, and semantics

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Popular proposals (1)

• First proposal General Magic. 1994.
• Implementation languages safe-Tcl, telescript
• More and more developments turn to Java
• IBM Aglet
• based on Java object serialization and security
• framework as Java extensive package
• implement the runtime layer (aglet engine)
• protocol proposal ATP based on HTTP
• aglet dispatching, class loading, messaging

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Popular proposals (2)

• Mobile Ambient Cardelli, Microsoft
• agents are in administrative domains
• domains are hierarchical
• mobility needs authorization
• Ambient named, bounded, nested, move as a whole,
  with agents inside.
• Unify mobile computing and mobile computation
  within a single framework
• formalized by calculus (from CCS)

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BIG issues and problems

• Security and safety
• agent to host security and safety
• agent to agent security
• host to agent security
• control structure
• coordination, termination, orphan
  detection
• Reliability of transaction and delivery
• agent state recovery
• agent delivery and message delivery

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Thank you!

• Reference go.to/freemanhuang