Context-aware exception handling in mobile agent systems: the MoCA case

  • Authors:

  • Karla Damasceno;Nelio Cacho;Alessandro Garcia;Alexander Romanovsky;Carlos Lucena

  • Affiliations:

  • Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro - PUC-Rio, Brazil;Lancaster University, United Kingdom;Lancaster University, United Kingdom;University of Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom;Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro - PUC-Rio, Brazil

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Software engineering for large-scale multi-agent systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Handling erroneous conditions in context-aware mobile agent systems is challenging due to their intrinsic characteristics: openness, lack of structuring, mobility, asynchrony, and increased unpredictability. Even though several context-aware middleware systems support now the development of mobile agent-based applications, they rarely provide explicit and adequate features for context-aware exception handling. This paper reports our experience in implementing error handling strategies in some prototype context-aware collaborative applications built with the MoCA (Mobile Collaboration Architecture) system. MoCA is a publish-subscribe middleware supporting the development of collaborative mobile applications by incorporating explicit services to empower software agents with context-awareness. We propose a novel context-aware exception handling mechanism and discuss some lessons learned during its integration in the MoCA infrastructure. The discussions include how to use other emerging implementation techniques, such as aspect-oriented programming, to address the limitations of classical publish-subscribe mechanisms identified in our study.