Integrating Mobile Agent Technology and COBRA Middleware

Magedanz, Thomas and Breugst, Markus and Busse, Ingo and Covaci, Stefan (1998) Integrating Mobile Agent Technology and COBRA Middleware. AgentLink News (1). pp. 5-9.

Abstract

Since the start of intensive research activities in the early 1990th, mobile agent technology has gained momentum in various application areas, such as electronic commerce, workflow management, and telecommunications. The reason for this are several benefits of this rather new technology, such as asynchronous task execution, reduction of network traffic, robustness, distributed task processing, and flexible ondemand service provision [1]. However, also legacy technologies, such as the traditional client/server paradigm, are still considered as suitable solutions for many distributed application scenarios. Currently, efforts are spent to combine these two approaches in order to realise a unified distributed middleware, supporting both client/server-based remote procedure calls and mobile agents. The recent OMG work on a Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facility (MASIF) [2] specification can be regarded as a milestone on the road toward such a unified middleware, which enables technology and location transparent interactions between static and mobile objects/agents. This paper illustrates the concepts of such a unified environment, focusing on the current state and future standardisation issues of the OMG MASIF submission.

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