IEEE/FIPA WG Mobile Agents Ulrich Pinsdorf Fraunhofer-Institute IGD, Germany Dept. Security Technology

© 2005, Fraunhofer IGD 2 Outline n Short overview on mobile agents n Mission statement of WG Mobile Agents n Focus for standardization n Objectives of the WG Mobile Agents n Planned documents n Roadmap

© 2005, Fraunhofer IGD 3 Concept of mobile agents n The system infrastructure consists of platform instances, local services, and mobile agents n Agent = Program-Code + Data + State + Meta-Information n Agents are able to migrate from one host to another n Agents are able to communicate with each other n Agent Platform provides access to local resources through services

© 2005, Fraunhofer IGD 4 Mobile agents n Mobile agents provides an easy to grasp and apply design paradigm for distributed multi-agent systems n Provide significant quantitative advantages regarding only temporary network connections necessary lower bandwidth consumption complex computations can be offloaded complex tasks are delegated natural kind of software distribution n Scientific community provides a number of well tested platforms for mobile agents.

© 2005, Fraunhofer IGD 5 Open issues A lot of work was done in the last 10 years, but there are many open problems, e.g.: n Migration between heterogeneous platforms n Interoperability for mobile code n Security concerns of mobile code n Representation of mobile code n How to develop mobile agents? Design-Patterns? Mobile Agent UML?

© 2005, Fraunhofer IGD 6 Conclusions n The research community should work on standards and agree on a reference architecture and integrate all solutions into a single toolkit. n It is still to early to abandon this fascinating concept! n We request for a IEEE/FIPA Work Group Mobile Agents

© 2005, Fraunhofer IGD 7 Mission of the WG Mobile Agents n Resume work on standards for mobile agents n Improve and extend existing specifications and recent research results n Propose minimal required specifications n Develop a reference architecture n Provide a communication platform for researchers, producers, users and interested people

© 2005, Fraunhofer IGD 8 Focus for standardization n Advanced code and data relocation n Migration between various agent toolkits with their specific advantages n Interoperability on run-time level n Security for mobile code n Location transparent communication n Location tracking

© 2005, Fraunhofer IGD 9 Objectives of the WG Mobile Agents n Starting from existing specifications, esp. FIPA specification 87 and OMG MASIF n Define new specifications for efficient, reliable, and secure code and data relocation location transparent communication location tracking infrastructure for agent server discovery interoperability on run-time level n We will avoid specific techniques but propose generic protocols and processes n Specifications will be accompanied by reference implementations in the form of toolkit independent software components.

© 2005, Fraunhofer IGD 10 Planned Documents n Experimental IEEE FIPA Mobile Agents Specifications by June n Reference implementation developed by October n Standard IEEE FIPA Mobile Agent Specification by December 2006.

© 2005, Fraunhofer IGD 11 Plan for Work and Milestones n Sep 2005: Establishment of WG Setting up communication infrastructure (Web page, Mailing list) Electing of WG officers Defining Charta and first agenda n Oct 2005: Call for participation Participants are invited to review the Charta and contribute their ideas Invitation for first technical meeting Start technical discussion n Dec 2005: 1st Technical meeting Finalization of the Charter and work agenda Specification outline n Apr 2006: Preliminary specification Distribute preliminary specification Determine open issues and possible solutions n Jun 2006: 2nd Technical meeting Finalization and publication of an experimental specification Spec is ready for implementation by the submitters n Oct 2006: Reference implementation Publication of the reference implementation n Dec 2006: Standard specification Publication of the standard specification, December 2006.

Thank you for your attention! Your questions are most welcome! Ulrich Pinsdorf Fraunhofer IGD, Darmstadt Abteilung Sicherheitstechnologie

© 2005, Fraunhofer IGD 13 Some related work of the proposing group n Volker Roth: Empowering Mobile Software Agents, Proc. 6th IEEE Mobile Agents Conference, LNCS, Spinger Verlag, n Peter Braun, Wilhelm Rossak: Mobile Agents–Basic Concept, Mobility Models, and the Tracy Toolkit. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, n Ulrich Pinsdorf: A Formal Approach for Interoperability between Mobile Agent Systems and Component Based Architectures. Proceedings of 11th IEEE International Conference on the Engineering of Computer-Based Systems, IEEE Computer Society Press, n Jan Peters, Volker Roth: A Scalable and Secure Global Tracking Service for Mobile Agents. Proc. Mobile Agents LNCS, Springer Verlag, 2001.