Mobile agents for distributed logic programming

This paper describes the use of mobile agent technologies in building a framework for supporting distributed logic programming. The distinctive idea is to replace the distributed unification mechanism in most distributed logic programming languages with the mobility and execution locality of mobile agents. Mobile agents, migrating among logic server hosts, accomplish distributed deductions by asserting program clauses and queries into the server triggering inferences, and retrieving results. The mobile agent framework is designed to integrate a mobile agent system and necessary logic servers. One of the distinguishing features of this framework is that each logic server retains its own autonomy. Another notable characteristic is the clauses exchange ability among distributed logic servers that may make many operations required by distributed knowledge processing easier. In a prototypical implementation, a Prolog system on a host will serve as a logic server and, in the mean time, as a standalone logic programming system in the host.