Exception handling in context-aware agent systems: A case study

Handling erroneous conditions in context-aware mobile agent systems is challenging due to their intrinsic characteristics: openness, lack of structuring, mobility, asynchrony and increased unpredictability. Even though several context-aware middleware systems now support the development of mobile agent-based applications, they rarely provide explicit and adequate features for context-aware exception handling. This paper reports our experience in implementing error handling strategies in some prototype context-aware collaborative applications built with the MoCA (Mobile Collaboration Architecture) system. MoCA is a publish-subscribe middleware supporting the development of collaborative mobile applications by providing explicit services that empower software agents with context-awareness. We propose a novel context-aware exception handling mechanism and discuss some lessons learned during its integration in the MoCA infrastructure.