Co-ordination of mobile information agents in TuCSoN

The increasing need to access and elaborate dynamic and heterogeneous infor mation sources distributed over the Internet calls for new models and parad igms for application design and development. The mobile agent paradigm prom otes the design of applications where agents roam through Internet sites to locally access and elaborate information and resources, possibly co-operat ing with each other. Focuses on mobile agent co-ordination, and presents th e TuCSoN co-ordination model for Internet applications based on mobile info rmation agents. TuCSoN exploits a notion of local tuple-based interaction s pace, called a tuple centre. A tuple centre is a tuple space enhanced with the capability of programming its behaviour in response to communication ev ents. This enables properties to be embedded into the interaction space, an d a mobile agent to be designed independently of the peculiarities of the i nformation sources. Several issues critical to Internet applications can th en be charged on tuple centres transparently to agents. The effectiveness o f the TuCSoN model is first shown by means of an application example in the area of Internet information retrieval, then discussed in the context of w orkflow management and electronic commerce.