Ruling Agent Motion in Structured Environments

The design and development of cooperative Internet applications based on mobile agents require appropriate modelling of both the physical space where agents roam and the conceptual space of mobile agent interaction. The paper discusses how an open, Internet-based, organisation network can be modelled as a hierarchical collection of locality domains, where agents can dynamically acquire information about resource location and availability according to their permissions. It also analyses the issue of how agent motion can be ruled and constrained within a structured environment by means of an appropriate coordination infrastructure.