Enhancing transparency and adaptability of dynamically changing execution environments for mobile agents

Mobile agent-based distributed systems become obtaining significant popularity as a potential vehicle to allow software components to be executed on heterogeneous environments despite mobility of users and computations. However as these systems generally force mobile agents to use only common functionalities provided in every execution environment, the agents may not access environment-specific resources. In this paper, we propose a new framework using aspect oriented programming technique to accommodate a variety of static resources as well as dynamic ones whose amount is continually changed at runtime even in the same execution environment. Unlike previous works, this framework divides roles of software developers into three groups to relieve application programmers from the complex and error-prone parts of implementing dynamic adaptation and allowing each developer to only concentrate on his own part. Also, the framework enables policy decision makers to apply various adaptation policies to dynamically changing environments for adjusting mobile agents to the change of their resources.