Abstract

To realize its promise of providing scaleable and optimal use of network resources, mobile agent technology must be integrated with non-mobile architectures (e.g., client-server) while taking into account the specific needs of applications. This paper introduces a general characterization of mobile agent applications that provides a framework for reasoning about such optimization issues. This framework is refined to enable analysis of alternative mobility policies, and the development of a new strategic mobility policy that uses the application characterization to intelligently decide on mobility. The analysis shows that the extreme cases of `always mobile' and `always stationary' are sub-optimal with respect to strategic mobility. Strategic mobility has been implemented in a software prototype called Mobile-AgentX and successfully tested in an application of concurrent engineering of MicroElectro -Mechanical Systems (MEMS). Keywords: Distributed Problem Solving, Agent Mobility Manag...

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