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Abstract:

Mobile agents are programs that travel through a computer communications network and have a persistent identity and local state. Agents can communicate with other mobile agents or with stationary (server) agents. Agents may travel to become co-resident with information or processing resources, to propagate data, or even to do business on behalf of their users. Possible applications include network management, service infrastructures, massively distributed information systems, and electronic commerce. First implementations of systems supporting mobile agents already exist. General Magic's Telescript language supports sending and receiving agents from remote machines. Sun Microsystems released the Java language, which can be used in combination Sun's WWW browser. Active electronic mail over the Internet is another example. The computational metaphor of mobile agents offers unique opportunities for structuring and implementing dynamic and open distributed systems and applications. But, numerous fundamental open technical problems must be addressed

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