Agent Navigator: A Model for Dynamic, Flexible Agent Mobility

An important characteristic of the mobile agents is their ability to hop autonomously from one machine to another in order to perform their tasks more efficiently. One design approach of the agent mobility facility is to equip the agents with an itinerary that specifies in a declarative fashion the navigation plan of the agent thus separating the navigation from the computation. Existing systems following this approach fail to support the dynamic modification and customisation of the agent’s itinerary plan. These characteristics are important because the agents should be capable of altering their migration plans depending on run-time conditions and information such as the current availability of services and level of network traffic. In this paper the architecture and functionality of an agent navigator, designed to alleviate the aforementioned problems, is presented. It is shown that the navigator can be embedded in every agent as an onboard facility and offers an interface via which the current active parts of its plan can modify the plan itself at run-time. Furthermore it is shown that the navigator’s contents can be used as re-usable components that can be copied to other agents thus allowing agents to share navigational knowledge.