Mobile-C: a mobile agent platform for mobile C-C++ agents

  • Authors:

  • Bo Chen;Harry H. Cheng;Joe Palen

  • Affiliations:

  • Integration Engineering Laboratory, Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, U.S.A.;Integration Engineering Laboratory, Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, U.S.A.;Office of New Technology and Research, California Department of Transportation, Box 942873, MS83, Sacramento, CA 94273, U.S.A.

  • Venue:
  • Software—Practice & Experience
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

This article presents the design, implementation and application of Mobile-C, an IEEE Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) compliant agent platform for mobile C/C++ agents. IEEE FIPA standards are a set of specifications designed to ensure the interoperation between agents in a heterogeneous network. Mobile-C conforms to the FIPA standards both at agent and platform level. Mobile-C extends FIPA standards to support mobile agents by integrating an embeddable C/C++ interpreter—Ch—into the platform as a mobile agent execution engine and defining a mobile agent mobility protocol to direct agent migration process. Agent migration in Mobile-C is achieved through FIPA agent communication language (ACL) messages encoded in XML. Using FIPA ACL messages for agent migration provides a straightforward but effective way for inter-platform agent migration in FIPA compliant agent systems as both agent communication and migration can share the same communication mechanism. Choosing scriptable C/C++ as a mobile agent language allows mobile agents easy interfacing with low-level software modules and underlying hardware. Mobile-C has been used to simulate highway traffic detection and management. The agent-based traffic detection and management system uses agent technology for real-time distributed traffic information fusion. Mobile agents in the system are used for dynamic code deployment and performing unanticipated actions. The application of agent technology shows a great potential for enhancing the interoperability, flexibility and distributed computing capabilities of intelligent transportation systems. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.