MAGNA-a DPE-based platform for mobile agents in electronic service markets

The global telecommunications environment is rapidly changing to a highly dynamic open environment, where a multitude of competing and/or cooperating service providers offer a steadily growing number of increasingly powerful communication and information services. The need for integration, ubiquitous service access and rapid service provisioning requires an open, universal service platform which supports both telecommunications and management applications. The development of such a platform based on the concept of distributed processing environments (DPEs) has been a major research area. However, DPEs are relatively inflexible. An entirely different platform approach is based on the application of agent technology. Of particular interest are mobile agents, autonomous and thus intelligent software entities, which may roam the network in the course of performing their designated tasks. They offer new opportunities for the provisioning of services in the emerging electronic service markets. Mobile intelligent agents need a distributed agent environment platform. Since both, distributed processing-based and agent-based service provisioning have their specific advantages, such a platform should support both paradigms. This paper provides an overview of the mobile agent architecture MAGNA, and the accompanying agent platform. The distributed agent environment provided by the MAGNA platform is based on current DPE concepts and therefore enables coexistence and integration of distributed and agent-based implementations of telecommunications and management applications