A virtual laboratory framework based on mobile agents

Abstract

This paper proposes a virtual laboratory framework based on mobile agents which can be applied to various experiment courses. We design two kinds of mobile agents including role agents and middleware services agents to simulate the behavior of human students and tutors and provide interactions and collaboration for students and tutors. The role agents provide the basic functionality for experiment courses: guiding, demonstrating, and explaining. And the middleware services agents enable the learning resources collaboration and the existing software application reuse to succeed. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework, Digital Circuit Virtual Laboratory (DCVL) has been successfully implemented applying it. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.