Management of mobile agent based services

Abstract

Currently, mobile agent technology is the topic of numerous proj- ects, performed by research institutes or industrial companies, and dealing with the development of agent based application or the realization of underlying platforms. Several suitable application areas have been identified up to now, among others dealing with the management of current networks or "traditional" services. However, little effort has been spent up to now regarding the management of a distributed agent environment itself, i.e. regarding the mobile agents themselves as resources to be managed. This must be regarded as an important task which cannot be sufficiently handled by today's management solutions. This paper describes the concepts of a service management system for mobile agent based services, also referred to as agent management system. The approach described in this paper is partly based on OSI Systems Management concepts which are modified in order to fulfil the new requirements associated with the mobile agent paradigm. At present, this approach is validated in the context of the European research project MARINE.