Mobile Agent Interaction in Heterogeneous Environments

• Main Authors: Peter Dömel, Anselm Lingnau, Oswald Drobnik
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Springer-Verlag 1997
• Subjects: mobile agents; interaction; HTTP; Telescript; ffMAIN; KQML; Tromsø
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.54.2918; http://www.webagents.de/pdoemel/res/ps/ma97.ps

An open problem in mobile agent research is the interaction between agents in different `worlds'. In this paper, we survey various approaches to agent interaction and discuss the interoperation between Telescript and ffMAIN agents through the use of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the shared information space provided by ffMAIN. Keywords: mobile agents, interaction, HTTP, Telescript, ffMAIN, KQML 1 Introduction Mobile agents---programs that can move around in a computer network on behalf of their users---are attracting more and more attention. Various research efforts take place in this area, for example TACOMA (Tromsø and Cornell, [1]), Ara (Universit at Kaiserslautern, [2]), Mole (Universitat Stuttgart, [3]), and the projects InAMoS and InAVAS of the DAI Laboratory/TU Berlin [4]. Several interpreted languages are suitable for the programming of mobile code. Among them Java [5], Tcl (with extensions like [incr tcl] or AgentTcl) [6], Python [7], and Perl [8]. Commercially a.