MAP: Design and implementation of a mobile agents' platform

The recent development of telecommunication networks has contributed to the success of applications such as information retrieval and electronic comme rce, as well as all the services that take advantage of communication in di stributed systems. In this area, the emerging technology of mobile agents a roused considerable interest. Mobile agents are applications that can move through the network for carrying out a given task on behalf of the user. In this work we present a platform called MAP (Mobile Agents Platform) for th e development and the management of mobile agents. The language used both f or developing the platform and for carrying out the agents is Java. The pla tform gives the user all the basic tools needed for creating some applicati ons based on the use of agents. It enables us to create, run, suspend, resu me, deactivate, reactivate local agents, to stop their execution, to make t hem communicate each other and migrate. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Scie nce B.V. All rights reserved.