Mobile Agents

Submitted to: Submitted by:Mrs. Gagandeep Kaur Navjot Kaur Roll no. 9480 Msc. IT (3rd Sem)

A software agent is a program that can halt itself, ship itself to another computer on the network, and continue execution at the new computer.

An agent doesn't restart execution from the beginning at the new computer; it continues where it left off.

Software agents can be classified as: - Static agents - Mobile agents.

Agents

Agents can not live by there selves, but must rely on a specific environment, called Agent Platform(AP)that is in charge of providing agents a set of resources and of controlling the agent life cycle.

The Agent Platform controls the agent lifecycle, deciding when an agent must be started and stopped, must be destroyed, messages must be delivered to and, so on.

It is in charge of keeping the state of each agent, as well as providing an unique way to identify each agent.

Agent platform

IntelligenceAutonomyResponsivenessCommunicative AbilityAdaptability

Properties of Agents

A special kind of agents are those called mobile, a type of agents that can move spontaneously between two or more different Agent Platforms.

Mobile Agents are autonomous, intelligent programs that move through a network, searching for and interacting with services on the user's behalf.

A Platform that supports mobile agents is called Mobile Agent Platform(MAP).

Mobile agents

Creation: A brand new agent is born and its state is initialized.

Dispatch: An agent travels to a new host. Cloning: A twin agent is born and the current state of

the original is duplicated in the clone. Deactivation: An agent is put to sleep and its state is

stored on a disk of the host. Activation: A deactivated agent is brought back to life

and its state is restored from disk. Retraction: An agent is brought back from a remote

host along with its state to the home machine. Disposal: An agent is terminated and its state is lost

forever.

Life cycle of a mobile agent

Applications

Data Collection

One application of mobile agents, therefore, is

collecting information spread across many computers hooked to a network

An example of this kind of application is a network backup tool.

An agent is given knowledge of user preferences in terms of a search criterion and sent out into the network on the user's behalf.

It shifts through huge amounts of data for those pieces of information of particular interest to the user.

At some point, it returns to the user to report its findings.

Searching and filtering

Another potential use of mobile agents is to distribute interactive news or advertising to interested parties.

Besides searching databases and files, agents can gain information by interacting with other agents.

If, for example, you want to schedule a meeting with several other people, you could send a mobile agent to interact with the representative agents of each of the people you want to invite to your meeting.

The agents could negotiate and establish a meeting time. In this case, each agent contains information about its user's schedule. To agree upon a meeting time, the agents exchange information.

Targeted information dissemination

Electronic commerce is another good fit for mobile agent technology.

A mobile agent could do your shopping for you, including making orders and potentially even paying.

Bartering

AGLETS JADE VOYAGER TACOMA GRASSHOPPER SPRINGS

The different types of mobile agent platforms have been developed :

University of California, Irvine Carnegie Mellon University (The Intelligent

Software Agents Lab) Dartmouth College, USA Department of Computer Science, Iowa State

University MIT Media Lab: Software Agents http://www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk/themes/abc/ http://www.agentlink.org/

Labs working on Mobile Agents

Thank You