Enabling mobile agents interoperability through FIPA standards

Abstract

Mobility offers important advantages to information agent applications, specially those related to information retrieval. However, problems like security and interoperability are important barriers to the adoption of this technology. This paper focuses its attention to interoperability. Over the years, several solutions for mobile agents have been proposed, but each one covering specific problems leaving others unsolved. In this paper we analyse the problem of interoperability of mobile agents as a whole. We present an approach based on the use of FIPA ACL as the foundations to reach interoperability between different mobile agent system implementations at different levels. The implementation of the proposed solution has been adopted by JADE as the default mechanism to move agents among platforms and it has been widely used by its community. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.