Use Of Mobile Agent Technology Research Articles

A Novel Approach for Mobile Maintenance Using Mobile Agents Technology and Mobile Devices

The long use of a system causes its degradation. Hence, the maintenance activity is required in order to keep and improve the efficiency in the system. With the rapid development in networking technology, a need appears to change the manufacturing strategies. These new technologies improve the maintenance process, and establish remote maintenance (tele-maintenance, e-maintenance and m-maintenance). These kinds of maintenance try to provide personnel maintenance with the right information at the suitable time, which makes information available, anywhere and anytime. Our proposition is the use of mobile agent technology to reduce the maintenance costs and solve the problem of the unavailability of an expert in all phases of condition-based maintenance (CBM) strategy. The mobile agent technology overcomes a lot of problems and there is not much work that has used this technology. We have also used the web services (WS) to insure interoperability between machines and to support interaction over the network. Our approach gives great support to the maintenance engineer as it facilitates the access to decision-making support, work order, etc. which are available in the device like smartphone. This paper presents the development of a mobile maintenance support system based on mobile agent technology. The proposed system, the web and agent technology as well as remote communication were tested successfully.

Mobile Agent based Train Control System for Mitigating Meet Conflict at Turnout

Timeliness and correctness in conflict detection and resolution mechanisms form an important component in railway operation especially when the decision process involves human factors. The current approaches used by Indian railways (IR) for conflict management can be enhanced through the use of Mobile Agent (MA) technology. The use of MA technology appropriates due to their asynchronous, autonomous, robust, and fault tolerant properties. In this paper, we discuss certain train operation conflicts and detail about meet conflict followed by implementation of MA based meet conflict management system for IR. Due to the suitability of formal modeling techniques for implementing highly dynamic and concurrent systems, in our rail traffic scenario we modeled the meet conflict detection and resolution mechanism using coloured petri net (CPN).

Promoting the development of secure mobile agent applications

In this paper, we present a software architecture and a development environment for the implementation of applications based on secure mobile agents. Recent breakthroughs in mobile agent security have unblocked this technology, but there is still one important issue to overcome: the complexity of programming applications using these security solutions. Our proposal aims to facilitate and speed up the process of implementing cryptographic protocols, and to allow the reuse of these protocols for the development of secure mobile agents. As a result, the proposed architecture and development environment promote the use of mobile agent technology for the implementation of secure distributed applications.

A Three-Dimensional Object-Oriented Distributed Finite Element Solver Based on Mobile Agent Technology

We present an object-oriented distributed finite element method (FEM) solver for three-dimensional scattering problems, implemented on a network of workstations. The solution of the resulting sparse linear system is performed using the conjugate orthogonal conjugate gradient method. The entire implementation is based on the Java programming language, and the distributed solution is achieved via the use of mobile agent technology. Since the paper aims mainly to demonstrate the benefits of using Java and mobile agents as the technologies to develop complex FEM applications and implement them in a distributed environment, its main core is devoted to a thorough description of the distributed-object-oriented implementation, focusing on inter-agent communication and synchronization aspects. Numerical results are presented, which prove that our approach is a promising technique for the efficient solution of complex FEM modeling problems.

Remote Configuration of Agent-Based Component Systems.

The nearly omnipresence of the Internet and the steady increase of wireless computing and mobile devices require highly dynamic adaptable distributed system architectures. Building such architectures needs a combination of key concepts from component technology and distributed systems. Mobile agents provide this combination. We use mobile agents as the building blocks of a component-based system for remote supervision and control of both hard- and software in a distributed environment. In this paper we concentrate on the configuration of individual components and component relationships in our system. We identify requirements for remote configuration of agentbased component systems and discuss architectural and user interface related issues of our approaches. We use a code-on-demand approach for supporting elaborate user interfaces. We use a generative approach based on enhanced meta-information for reducing development effort. The presented approaches are applicable for remote configuration of component-based systems in general and consider additional requirements imposed through the use of mobile agent technology.

Mobile Agent-Based Performance Management for the Virtual Home Environment

Virtual Home Environment (VHE) encompasses the deployment and management of adaptable services that retain any personalized service aspects, irrespective of terminal, network' and geographic location. We assert that the dynamic nature of the VHE requires management capabilities that can be suitably provided through the use of mobile agent technology. We examine four different engineering solutions for the realization of a VHE performance management component that allows service adaptation in relation to the available network Quality-of-Service (QoS). The mobile agent approach is compared with competing technologies in order to identify the benefits of this novel application of mobile agents, discuss its drawbacks' and finally focus on the lessons learned from our prototype system. Although mobile agents are typically associated with increased performance costs, it is through agent migration that we were able to address the VHE requirements of universality, dynamic programmability, and network technology independence.

Mobile agent and CORBA technologies in the broadband intelligent network

This article presents an IN architecture that is based on distributed object and mobile agent technologies. It deviates from traditional IN in two prominent ways: first, by substituting message-based protocols with a CORBA distributed processing environment. The new communications infrastructure not only serves to convey IN flows, but also functions as a potent unifying location-transparent layer. Second, the new architecture makes heavy use of mobile agent technology. Service logic programs are implemented as mobile agents, and are thus not constrained to control the switch's operations remotely from a central location. Instead, they can migrate and control its operations locally. The infrastructure elements of the architecture exploit this ability of service logic programs by cloning them and dragging their clones to the appropriate locations in response to excess processing or signaling load. The architecture is in this way self-balancing, in contrast to the centralized nature of traditional IN. A prototype implementation is presented along with a service creation framework that enables the IN service designer to disregard environment-related issues and concentrate on the IN logic of the services per se.

RELIABILITY CONCEPTS FOR MOBILE AGENTS

The use of mobile agent technology has been proposed for various fault-sensitive application areas, including electronic commerce and system management. A prerequisite for the use of mobile agents in these environments is that agents have to be executed reliably, independent of communication and node failures. In this article, we present two approaches improving the level of fault-tolerance in agent execution. The introduction of an itinerary concept allows to specify an agent's travel plan flexibly and provides the agent system with the possibility to postpone the visit of currently unavailable nodes or to choose alternative nodes in case of node failures. The second approach is a recently proposed fault-tolerant protocol to ensure the exactly-once execution of an agent. With this protocol, agents are preformed in stages. Each stage consists of a number of nodes. One of these nodes executes the agent while the others monitor the execution. After a summary of this protocol, we focus on the construction of stages. In particular, we investigate how the number of nodes per stage influences the probability of an agent to be blocked due to failures and which nodes should be selected when forming a stage to minimize the protocol overhead.