An Itinerary-Diagram-based Approach for Mobile Agent Application Development

We propose an approach to design mobile agent applications for content-based multimedia information retrieval or electronic commerce on the Internet. The specific mobile agents of interest are called adlets, which are mobile agents carrying the metadata of various kinds of multimedia documents. Adlets autonomously travel from site to site on the Internet, advertising its contents and interacting with other adlets to gather information or to perform an electronic commerce task. Protocols are used to specify the behavior of such adlets. To design mobile agent applications, itinerary diagrams are developed to specify the protocols at the abstract level. Guidelines and templates are then provided to construct adlet types from the itinerary diagrams. The final output – the adlet types – are formal specifications called Multiple State Machines (MSMs). This approach therefore utilizes intuitively meaningful visual diagrams to produce rigorous formal specifications to expedite mobile agent application development.