Mobile Agent Oriented Software Engineering (MAOSE)

Mobile agent (MA) has gained a lot of researchers' interests for its outstanding superiorities. For a long time, it is regarded as a subsidiary subject of agent technique. Accordingly, people tend to develop MA-based system relying on the methodologies of Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE). In fact, they are not well suitable for mobile agent. Most agent methodologies have not sufficiently considered the migration characteristic of mobile agent, and the spatial coordinate is unconsciously ignored. Migration is in the network, so the network's island property should be taken into account. Mobile agent should be manageable, and their population must be controlled in proportion to environment resource. In this paper, a novel subject - Mobile Agent Oriented Software Engineering (MAOSE) is represented, which is based on the improvement of MAS-CommonKADS and MESSAGE, with spatiotemporal concept and the idea of ecology introduced. The new methodology consists of agent model, organization model, clan model, task model, interaction model, migration model and knowledge model, which can describe mobile agent system and contribute to the design of MA-based software system.