Abstract
Mobile agents are code-containing objects that may be transmitted between communicating participants in a distributed system. Compared to systems that only allow the exchange of nonexecutable data, those incorporating mobile agents can achieve significant gains in performance and functionality.
Languages with first-class functions provide a good starting point for agent programming, as they make it easy to express the construction, transmission, receipt, and subsequent execution of agents. However, for developing real agent-based systems, a language implementation must handle architectural heterogeneity between communicating machines and provide sufficient performance for applications based on agents. In addition, agents need to be able to access resources on remote execution sites yet remain in a framework that provides sufficient security. In this paper we consider the uses of mobile agents and how a distributed functional language can be extended to support them. We review other agent languages and present several observations on how further work in this area may proceed.
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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Knabe, F. (1997). An overview of mobile agent programming. In: Dam, M. (eds) Analysis and Verification of Multiple-Agent Languages. LOMAPS 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1192. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62503-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-62503-8_5
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