Using Components for Modeling Intelligent and Collaborative Mobile Agents

Intelligence, collaboration and mobility are the main important features in designing agents for electronic commercial systems. But very few systems permit to implement agents which have all these characteristics. In this paper, we address the problems of designing intelligent collaborative mobile agents. We propose a componential approach for designing and implementing such agents. Our framework architecture for agents decouples components expressing the internal behavior of an agent from components expressing coordination between agents in order to enhance modularity and reusability. Our agent design and implementation environment consists in three distinct phases : modeling, validation and implementation. We have developed a component description language for easy modeling of componential agent architecture. The component specification is automatically translated into Java source code by our compiler, and then integrated into a mobile agent platform. We have integrated our agent implementation environment into two different mobile agent platforms, namely JNA (JavaNet Agent) and Voyager. We have tested our agent development system with the Travel Agency scenario, one of the standard electronic commercial service examples.