Service Migration and a Transparency Service

2012

The efficient utilization of network resources is an important issue. The problem is hard due to the distributed nature of computer networks, high communication demands and the desire for limited communication overheads. One solution to such challenges is to design efficient, decentralized and fault-tolerant data propagation model which accomplishes tasks with no access to global network information. Mechanisms of agent propagation are useful because agents can be organised into efficient configurations without imposing external centralised controls. Operation without a central coordinator eliminates possible bottlenecks in terms of scalability and reliability

2008

This paper presents a migration strategy for a set of mobile agents (MAs) in order to satisfy customers' requests in a transport network, through a multimodal information system. In this context, we propose an optimization solution which operates on two levels. The first one aims to constitute a set of MAs building their routes, called Workplans. At this stage, Workplans must incorporate all nodes, representing information providers in the multimodal network, in order to explore it completely. Thanks to an evolutionary approach, the second level must optimize nodes' selection in order to increase the number of satisfied users. The assignment of network nodes to the required services must be followed by a Workplan update procedure in order to deduce final routes paths. Finally, simulation results are mentioned to invoke the different steps of our adopted approach.

2005

MoviLog is a novel programming language that aims at reducing the effort of programming mobile agents. MoviLog is based on the concept of Reactive Mobility by Failure (RMF), a mechanism that migrates a mobile agent when it tries to access a resource that is not located at the current site. This paper presents an extension of RMF that allows the programmer to adapt the mechanisms used by RMF for deciding when and where to move an agent. Experimental results showing gains in network usage and performance with respect to client/server and traditional mobility mechanisms are also reported.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000

2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2015

We introduce a new problem in the area of scheduling and route planning operations called the service agent transport problem (SATP). Within the SATP, autonomous service agents must perform tasks at a number of locations. The agents are free to move between locations, however, the agents may also be transported throughout the region by a limited number of faster-moving transport agents. The goal of the SATP is to plan a schedule of service agent and transport agent actions such that all locations are serviced in the shortest amount of time. We pose the problem using a mixed-integer linear programming optimization framework, and compare several complexity reduction heuristics to the full optimization.

From the recent improvements in network and peer-to-peer technologies and the ever-growing needs for computer might, new ways of sharing resources between users have emerged. These methods are very diverse, from SETI@HOME which is a way to share the load of analysing the data from space in order to find traces of extraterrestrial life, to NAPSTER and its successors, and to Real-time video-games. However, these technologies allow only centralised calculus-sharing, even if they already offer "peer-to-peer" sharing of data. We present in this paper a method based on Multiagent systems which allow load-sharing between distant users.

2005

In recent years, Grid computing has emerged as a promising alternative to increase the capacity of processing and storage, through integration and sharing of multi-institutional resources. MAG (Mobile Agents for Grid Computing Environments)is a research project that explores the mobile agent paradigm as a way to overcome the design and implementation challenges of developing a Grid middleware. MAG executes Grid applications by dynamically loading the application code into a mobile agent. The MAG agent can be dynamically reallocated to Grid nodes though a transparent migration mechanism, as a way to provide load balancing and support for non-dedicated nodes. This paper describes MAG transparent migration mechanism implementation and performance evaluation.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005

The agent metaphor has shown its usefulness for modelling as well as implementing complex and dynamic applications. Although a number of agent applications has been successfully realised and used, it must be stated that the distribution of commercial off-the-shelf applications is very scarce. For this discontenting situation, at least two reasons can be identified. On the one hand, the development of agent based applications is difficult suffering from insufficient standards and tools and on the other hand deployment issues are little researched and supported. In this paper, several deployment related topics are discussed and a vision for the deployment of distributed multi-agent systems is conceived. From the vision, requirements for launching and configuring agent applications are derived. According to these requirements, a platform independent reference model of the proposed deployment infrastructure is presented. The reference model provides the basis for the development of our ASCML (Agent Society Configuration Manager and Launcher) tool, which is currently implemented for the JADE and Jadex multi-agent platforms.

J. Univers. Comput. Sci., 2009

A lot of work is devoted to analysing architectures for coordinating the behaviour of individual agents. However, providing agents with abilities to migrate continues to be a highly challenging problem. We propose a novel multi-agent framework, called Agent-based Migration (AM). We begin by defining the principal objective, which is the migration phenomenon applied, in our case, to distributed calculation of prime numbers. We present the AM architecture in detail. Then, we introduce different types of migration and the communication scheme. We also conduct a set of experiments in two environments: 4 heterogeneous computers and 45 (almost) homogeneous computers. Specifically, we are looking for a way to find optimal configurations for migration in both environments. The conclusion from this work is that introducing propagation to a system in a form of agent migration in both networks could considerably decrease the execution time according to used algorithms and established assumptions.

2005

Grid computing has emerged as a promising alternative to increase the capacity of processing and storage. It is an aggregation of dynamic, heterogeneous, and widely distributed resources, shared among different institutions. In order to provide load balancing and support for non-dedicated machines, the Grid middleware must be able to move computations among its nodes. This paper describes a transparent migration mechanism in the context of MAG, a mobile agent based Grid middleware. It discuss the use of process migration in Grid infra-structures and details MAG migration framework implementation and performance evaluation.