Evolution of ubiquitous autonomous agents
International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing
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Driven by technological advancements, market growth and deregulation, the global telecommunications environment is rapidly changing its face towards a highly dynamic open environment, where a multitude of competing and/or cooperating service providers offer a steadily growing number of increasingly powerful communication and information services. Due to the number of relevant stake holders, this environment is characterized by great technological and organizational diversity. The need for integration, ubiquitous service access and rapid service provisioning requires an open, universal service platform which supports both, telecommunications and management applications. The development of such a platform based on the concept of distributed processing environments (DPEs) has been a major research area for some time now, and has also yielded important results (e.g. CORBA, TINA). However, since DPEs are based on the centralized client/server paradigm, they are relatively inflexible, and do not adapt well to rapidly changing, or customer-specific requirements. An entirely different platform approach is based on the application of agent technology. Of particular interest are mobile agents, autonomous and thus intelligent software entities, which may roam the network in the course of performing their designated tasks. Due to their inherent autonomy and mobility they offer new opportunities for the provisioning of services in the emerging electronic service markets. The prerequisite for the execution of mobile intelligent agents in distributed service environments is the provision of a distributed agent environment platform. Since both, distributed processing-based and agent-based service provisioning have their specific advantages, such a platform should support both paradigms. This paper provides an overview of the mobile agent architecture MAGNA, and the accompanying agent platform. Both are currently under development by GMD FOKUS in the context of the MAGNA project. The distributed agent environment provided by the MAGNA platform is based on current DPE concepts and technologies. It therefore enables coexistence and integration of distributed and agent-based implementations of telecommunications and management applications.