Present and future trends of mobile agent technology

Abstract

Mobile agents are an emerging technology that makes it very much easier to design, implement, and maintain distributed systems. We have found that mobile agents reduce the network traffic, provide an effective means of overcoming network latency, and perhaps most importantly, through their ability to operate asynchronously and autonomously of the process that created them, help you to construct more robust and fault-tolerant systems.

What is the current state of commercialization of mobile agent technology? Where is research heading in this field? How will standardization efforts impact the future of this technology? Those are just a few questions I will cover in my talk. I will in particular cover the impact of Java and report on current efforts to create a standard Java Agent API. I will also cover some of the deficiencies in present approaches to agent mobility and throw light on recent attempts to overcome these problems.