Intelligent mobile agents in large distributed autonomous cooperative systems

A large distributed autonomous cooperative system is a system that provides fundamental services for integrating high-level services in a large distri buted system with local autonomy for individual system platforms and proces ses. This paper discusses the role and the functions of Intelligent Mobile Agents (IMAs) in large distributed autonomous cooperative systems. Rather t han providing services to a user at the application level, IMAs considered in this pager are deemed an integral part of system level software and perf orm tasks that are considered central to the distributed system. A variety of solutions to problems that are inherent to the distributed nature of the computing infrastructure may be implemented through a system of IMAs. Thes e problems include, but are by no means limited to, load balancing, schedul ing, information retrieval and management, distributed decision support, ro uting and flow control, security and intrusion detection. In this paper we discuss some of characteristics of IMA based systems central to solving som e of these problems. The effectiveness of IMAs in large distributed systems clearly depends on the design and implementation of the underlying IMA arc hitecture. This paper discusses the features that must be provided by the I MA infrastructure in support of IMAs that are an integral part of the large distributed autonomous cooperative system. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.