Airports for agents: An open MAS infrastructure for mobile agents

Abstract

Airports for Agents1 (AA) is an implemented distributed multi-agent infrastructure designed for dynamic and unstable Internet environment. The infrastructure consists of platforms called Airports that enable agents to communicate together and to be persistent. Furthermore, the Airports allow agents to migrate trough the system and to use local resources. Any Airport can host any agent from the network, therefore we considered high requirements for the security. Network of Airports can dynamically change in the time as new Airports connect to the system, or disconnect. We designed distributed stochastic algorithm keeping the system connected, because AA has no central element. The agent migration brings a communication problem known in the field of distributed systems: where to find the agent I have been communicated with, previously, while he changed his location (platfrom)? We present Kept Connection as a transparent solution of this problem. System is designed to be distributed over large amount of computers.