Selection of mobile agents

When a task is assigned to mobile agents, those suitable to perform the task need to be selected according to, not only their application-specific behaviors, but also their mobilities. The focus of current research, however is on the development of execution platforms and applications for mobile agents and not on methodologies for selection of mobile agents. This paper presents a general approach to selecting mobile agents according to their itineraries among multiple hosts. The approach offers a process algebra-based language for formally specifying the itineraries of mobile agents and an algebraic order relation between two itineraries specified as terms of the language. The relation can strictly decide whether or not the itineraries of mobile agents can satisfy the itinerary required by a given task, in the sense that the agents can migrate to all the hosts required by the task in the permissible order specified by the task. A prototype implementation of this approach was constructed on a Java-based mobile agent system. It enables each mobile agent to specify its itinerary as a term of the language and to migrate over a network according to only the itinerary. Also, when it receives a task request from its external environment, it can select a suitable mobile agent to perform the task by using the order relation. The paper also describes its implementation and a practical application.