CORBA solutions for interoperability in mobile agent environments

The mobile Aaent (MA) paradigm proposes several attractive solutions to deal with the problems of network-centric programming. Despite the availability of several MA platforms, there are still only a few MA-based distributed services. The paper claims that the lack of interoperability is one of the major obstacles to the large-scale diffusion of the MA paradigm, and discusses solutions to permit the interworking between heterogeneous MA frameworks and other systems, whether MA-based or not, via compliance with either accepted or emerging interoperability standards. In particular we focus on compliance with CORBA, the accepted standard for OO components, but also with MASIF and FIPA, respectively, the OMG specification for the support of agent mobility and management, and the framework for standard languages and protocols in agent communication. The paper also reports performance results of CORBA-based interoperability in the SOMA programming framework: the presented costs, measured for a systems management application, show the feasibility of the adopted interoperability solutions