Mobile agents in autonomous decentralized systems

In the last years mobile agents have gained much attention in the industry and academic community. Many prototype systems and some products providing mobile agent capability have been developed and mobile agents have been proposed for being used in a set of application areas, such as electronic commerce, workflow systems, network management, among others. In the last years we also experienced an enormous development in the direction of network centric computing. Complex distributed environments emerge that enable and support the integration of systems and that allow new forms of automated cooperation. For an effective integration to take place, the autonomy of participants in the environment must be taken into consideration. Such environments represent then examples of autonomous decentralised systems (ADSs). In this paper the authors present their view on the convenience of applying mobile agents to ADSs. Firstly, some benefits of mobile agents that can be explored in applications are presented. Afterwards, a discussion of some issues that shall enable more effective use of mobile agents in real applications and that have impact on the definition of the scope of applicability of mobile agents to ADSs is presented