Introduction
Application
Areas
Documentation
Recent Work
Component
Model
Visual
Construction
Abstraction
Layer
Current Work
Event
Model
Service
Adaptation
Time
Planner
For Students
Praktika!
Diplomarbeiten!
*This project is suspported by IBM Research Division, Zurich Research Laboratory
Introduction
Mobile agents, programs that move within a system performing a set of tasks, are an active field of research. The focus of current research, however, is on the development of execution platforms and applications for mobile agents and not on methodologies for building agents.Since the creation of mobile agents can be a tedious and error prone task, we propose to create mobile agents from a set of components. Building systems from software components has already proven useful in the context of large software systems, increasing the productivity of the development process and the reliability of the resulting system by reusing proven components.
Based on this model we have implemented the AgentBean Development Kit (ADK) which allows to build mobile agents from components and implemented sample components for network and systems management tasks. This has shown the usability of our approach for network and systems management. We claim that the same holds true for other application domains as well.
Application Areas
- Network and Systems Management
- Our current focus is on network and systems management. We have implemented agents that collect various data using SNMP (i.e. network load, uptime) and an agent that discovers the network topology. In the future we plan to implement components necessary for an agent to compute the placement of replica servers and try to find out the network topology without having access to a router's Management Information Base.
- Computer Supported Cooperative Work
- One of our students will be implementing a distributed time planner using the ADK.
- ...
- If you have any experiences using the ADK for other application domains, please share your experiences with us by sending mail to Thomas Gschwind.
Documentation
Information necessary to install the ADK is included in the ADK distribution. There is also a paper giving an overview of the system that will be presented at the ASA/MA99 conference. The paper is also available as technical report in our technical report database.
If you have any questions or bug reports bug-reports please do not hesitate to contact me directly by sending mail to Thomas Gschwind <tom@infosys.tuwien.ac.at>.