Enabling the reuse of Platform-Dependent Agents in Heterogeneous Agent-based Applications

There is an increasing interest in the development of applications which involve agents operating on (mobile) agent-based platforms of different types (heterogeneous agent-based applications). In this context, a relevant and emerging issue concerns the possibility of integrating platform dependent agents (i.e. agents which were specifically developed for a particular agent platform) in these applications. This issue becomes particularly important in the development of inter-organization agent-based applications where different organizations, which usually adopt different agent platforms and related applications for offering their services, may attempt to join to constitute a new (virtual) organization or, simply, to jointly offer new services to users. This paper presents a solution for enabling the reuse of platform-dependent agents in heterogeneous agent-based applications. The proposed solution is a natural enhancement of JIMAF and makes it the only full-fledged interoperability approach which, without requiring any modification to the platforms made interoperable, fully addresses the main interoperability issues of migration, execution, and communication among heterogeneous mobile agent platforms and also provides platform-dependent agent-based code reuse. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.