Modeling mobile agent systems with high level Petri nets

The paper presents a Petri net based approach for architectural modeling of mobile agent systems. An agent template (net) is proposed to model a changing number of autonomous and communicative software agents. An agent space is explicitly abstracted as a component, consisting of mobility environment (system net), agent templates (agent nets), and internal connector (net). Agent transfer is naturally captured by transition firing. To assure the strong mobility, the agent´s state is delivered during migration. Agent mobility in OMG´s MASIF is also examined by formalizing the interoperable agent system architecture