About David Jones

Profile Picture David is a Software Developer from the UK with over 12 years experience. He holds a bachelors degree in Economics, and a masters degree in Software Development, from which many of the pages on this site have evolved. His interests include all things C#/.NET along with software frameworks, architectures and design patterns.

When not developing software David plays bass in a psychedelic rock band who are currently recording their first album.

The Mobile Agent Facility Specification

The Object Management Group has published the Mobile Agent Facility Specification (MASIF) as a standard to promote interoperability between mobile agent based systems developed in a common language but by different vendors (OMG, 2000). The OMG propose that the mobile agent community should standardise: Agent management, Agent transfer, Agent and Agent system names, and location syntax. The specification does not define standards for local agent operations claiming that these are implementation specific. The MASIF specification provides standardised definitions for mobile agents and systems, and presents a common interface for agents. Whilst this project focused on Apoptotic Computing and therefore did not research agent systems per se, agents were used as a vehicle for discussion in the prototypes due to the amount of existing literature on agents within the field of Autonomic Computing.

Staneva and Gacheva (2004) describe how they have developed the communications infrastructure for their MAPNET Mobile-Agent platform in C# using .NET Remoting and Serialization, following the MASIF specification for migration. In their conclusion they describe developing the communications services as being one of the most challenging and important tasks in building the platform. It is for this reason that agents are simulated and used only as a vehicle for discussion in this project.

References

OMG, 2000. Mobile Agent Facility Specification. 140 Kendrick Street, Building A, Suite 300, Needham, MA 02494 USA, USA: Object Management Group, Inc. Object Management Group.

Staneva, D. & Gacheva, P., 2004. The communication infrastructure of the MAPNET mobile-agent platform. In CompSysTech '04: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Computer systems and technologies., 2004. ACM.