Coordination infrastructures for mobile agents

The mobile agent technology is gaining more and more interest in the distri buted systems community. In this context, suitable coordination models are needed to handle the coordination, both among mobile agents and between age nts and Internet resources. This paper presents two coordination infrastruc tures that follow two different coordination models: Aglets, based on the m essage-passing coordination model, and Mobile Agent Reactive Spaces (MARS), based on the Linda-like one. These two approaches are compared in detail, and a mobile-agent application in the area of auction-based negotiation is used to evaluate the pros and cans of the Aglets and MARS solutions in a co ncrete field. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.