Recent active research on mobile agent systems concerns the areas of agent facility standardization, mobile agent system interoperability, and operating system support [17, 20, 24, 38]. The platforms developed by such works provide the basic agent system functionality upon which our runtime system is built. We add to this functionality the ability to adapt mobile agent and we add the event mechanisms necessary for building dynamic runtime support for monitoring and for adaptation initiation and enactment.
Research results from software specialization systems like SPIN, Exokernel, and Synthetix may be applied to our adaptable agent architecture to customize the agent system itself and/or individual agents. We will focus on customization issues more specific to mobile agent environments.
We have already benefited from research on object policies and on meta-objects[35, 16] to develop the `adaptor' concept presented in section 3. Our work will also take advantage of current research on quality of service infrastructures like BBN's QuO[45] and Honeywell's ARA[34], but we will adapt their techniques to the mobile agent domain targeted by our work.
Our work is part of a broader project described in [1], with early results are presented in [2].