Toward Dynamic Interoperability of Mobile-Agent Systems

Mobile agents are an increasingly popular paradigm and in recent years there has been a proliferation of mobile-agent systems. These systems are, however, largely incompatible with each other. In particular, agents cannot mi- grate to a host that runs a different mobile-agent system. Prior approaches to in- teroperability 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 dy- namic runtime interoperability of mobile-agent systems. This paper describes the Grid Mobile-Agent System , which allows agents to migrate to different mobile- agent systems.