Agent Mobility with Weak Local Inheritance and Transactional Remote Logic Invocation

We introduce a simple agent construct associated to a named local database and a “Twitter-style” weak inheritance mechanism between local agents. On top of a remote predicate call layer, connecting distributed agent spaces, we build a replication mechanism allowing agents “visiting” remote spaces to expose their computational capabilities to non-local followers. The resulting protocol has the remarkable property that only updates to the state of the agents are sent over the network through transactional remote predicate calls guaranteed to always terminate, and therefore spawning of multiple threads can be avoided. At the same time, calls to a visiting agent’s code by its followers are always locally executed, resulting in performance gains and reduced communication efforts. An implementation of the concepts discussed in this paper is available from http://www.vivomind.com/lprolog/.