ATOMAS A Transaction-oriented Open Multi Agent-System. Final(7)

ATOMAS:

2Workplan and Project State8designed and implemeted in the previous year, version 3.0 of Mole now provides an extensiveinfrastructure for agents, including a resource manager, a directory service and a global namingscheme for agents. In order to support the design of agents, a graphical agent monitor allows tovisualize the system behaviour as a whole or of a single agent in particular. Mole further pro-vides a thread management unit to overcome some shortcomings of the Java virtual machine.Mole provides a simple means for installation and con guration of the system.

2.5Orphan Detection for Mobile Agent Systems

Orphan detection in an agent system is very important both from the user’s and from the systemside, because a running agent uses resources which are valuable to both user and system. Theuser has to pay for resources (at least in principle), and the system has only a limited amount ofthem. So if the user does not need the results of a distributed computation in progress anymore,he wants to be able to terminate the computation to minimize the resulting cost. With an orphandetection mechanism the user simply declares the agents to be terminated as orphans. Orphandetection guarantees that the now useless agents can be determined by the system and ended,thus freeing the resources they have bound. In this paper we will present a new protocol, theshadow protocol, that allows both control of mobile agents and orphan detection.