Mobile agents are autonomous software entities driven by a set of goals and tasks. Reactivity, social ability, autonomy, the ability to move to different network locations, and the weak agent notion of proactiveness, allow for autonomous processing of distributed information according to their environment (context awareness). Although agent mobility has been devised for homogeneous environments, deployment of agent mobility in heterogeneous environments has been hindered by the absence of a common set of interoperation rules and ontologies for different agent middlewares. In this article, an agent migration model based on the communication standards of the IEEE-FIPA organisation is proposed. The approach described encompasses the definition of several specifications to achieve interoperability in the migration process in heterogeneous environments. The model provides a basic and extensible common migration process, which is flexible enough to support different kinds of migration methods and future upgrades. It is completely independent of any specific middleware implementation. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Work partially funded by the MEC Spanish Ministry through the project TSI2006-03481, and project ARES – CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 CSD2007-00004, the AGAUR Catalan Agency through the Grant 2005-FI-00752, and the European Social Fund (ESF). The authors are also grateful for the support provided by Stichting NLnet www.nlnet.nl

Peer Reviewed