CACM: A new coordination model in mobile agent-based information retrieval applications

In mobile agent systems, an application may be composed of several mobile agents that cooperatively perform a task. Multiple mobile agents need to communicate and interact with each other to accomplish their cooperative goal. Coordination model aims to provide solutions to interactions between concurrent activities, hiding the computing details and focusing on interaction between activities. A Context-aware coordination model (CACM), which combines mobility and coordination, is proposed for mobile agent applications, i.e. in mobile agent based information retrieval applications. The context-aware coordination model transfers interactions between agents from globally coupling interactions to locally uncoupling tuple space interactions. In addition, programmable tuple space is adopted to solve the problems of context-aware coordination introduced by mobility and data heterogeneity in mobile agent systems. Furthermore, environment specific and application specific coordination policy can be integrated into the programmable tuple space for customized requirements. Finally an application sample system-information retrieval in mobile agent applications is carried out to test the performance of the proposed model.