A Reactive Planner-Based Mobile Agent System

Mobile agents have the unique ability to transport themselves from one system in a network to another. The ability to travel allows mobile agents to move to a system that contains services with which they want to interact and then to take advantage of being in the same host or network as the service. But most of conventional mobile agent systems require that the users or the programmer should give the mobile agent its detail behavioral script for accomplishing the given task. And during its runtime, such mobile agents just behave according to the fixed script given by its user. Therefore it is impossible that conventional mobile agents autonomously build their own plants and execute them in considering their ultimate goals and the dynamic world states. One way to overcome such limitations of conventional mobile agent systems is to develop an intelligent mobile agent system embedding a reactive planner. In this paper, we design both a model of agent mobility and a model of inter-agent communication based upon the representative reactive planning agent architecture called JAM. An then we develop an intelligent mobile agent system with reactive planning capability, IMAS, by implementing additional basic actions for agent moves and inter-agent communication within JAM according to the predefined models. Unlike conventional mobile agents. IMAS agents can be able to adapt their behaviors to the dynamic changes of their environments as well as build their own plans autonomously. Thus IMAS agents can show higher flexibility and robustness than the conventional ones.