Co-ordination of Mobile Information Agents in TuCSoN

The increasing need to access and elaborate dynamic and heterogeneous information sources distributed over the Internet calls for new models and paradigms for application design and development. The mobile agent paradigm promotes the design of applications where agents roam through Internet sites to locally access and elaborate information and resources, possibly cooperating with each other. This paper focuses on mobile agent coordination, and presents the TuCSoN coordination model for Internet applications based on mobile information agents. TuCSoN exploits a notion of local tuple-based interaction space, called a tuple centre. A tuple centre is a tuple space enhanced with the capability of programming its behaviour in response to communication events. This enables properties to be embedded into the interaction space, and a mobile agent to be designed independently of the peculiarities of the information sources. Several issues critical to Internet applications can then be charged upon tuple centres transparently to agents. The effectiveness of the TuCSoN model is first shown by means of an application example in the area of Internet information retrieval, then discussed in the context of workflow management and electronic commerce.