Growing recognition of the benefits of mobile agents in distributed systems, such as military C4ISR, has led to a proliferation of mobile agent systems. However, incompatibilities between proprietary systems prevent the greater potential benefits of ubiquitous mobile agent computing. In particular, agents cannot migrate to a host that runs a different mobile-agent system. Prior approaches to interoperability have tried to force agents to use a common API and so far none have succeeded. This goal led to our efforts to develop mechanisms that support runtime interoperability of mobile-agent systems. This paper describes the Grid Mobile-Agent System, which allows agents to migrate to different mobile-agent systems.
['Arne Grimstrup', 'Robert S. Gray', 'David Kotz', 'Maggie R. Breedy', 'Marco Carvalho', 'Thomas B. Cowin', 'Daria A. Chacón', 'Joyce Barton', 'Chris Garrett', 'Martin O. Hofmann']
Toward Interoperability of Mobile-Agent Systems