Evolution and Maintenance of Proxy Networks for Location Transparent Mobile Agent and Formal Representation By Graph Transformation Rules

Mobile agent technology has been the subject of much attention in the last few years, mainly due to the proliferation of distributed software technologies combined with the distributed AI research field. In this paper, we present a design of communication networks of agents that cooperate with each other for forwarding messages to the specific mobile agent in order to make the overall system location transparent. In order to make the material accessible to general intelligent system researchers, we present the general ideas abstractly in terms of the graph theory. In particular, a proxy network is defined as a directed acyclic graph satisfying some structural conditions. In turns out that the definition ensures some kind of reliability of the network, in the sense that as long as at most one proxy agent is abnormal, there agent exists a communication path, from every proxy agent to the target agent, without passing through the abnormal proxy. As the basis for the implementation of this scheme, an appropriate initial proxy network is specified and the dynamic nature of the network is represented by a set of graph transformation rules. It is shown that those rules are sound, in the sense that all graphs created from the initial proxy network by zero or more applications of the rules are guaranteed to be proxy networks. Finally, we will discuss some implementation issues.