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The electronic marketplace of the future will consist of a large
number of services located on an open, distributed and heterogeneous
platform, which will be used by an even larger number of clients.
Mobile Agent Systems are considered to be a precondition for the
evolution of such an electronic market. They can provide a flexible
infrastructure for this market, i.e. for the installation of new
services by service agents as well as for the utilization of these
services by client agents. Mobile Agent Systems basically consist of
a number of locations and agents. Locations are (logical)
abstractions for (physical) hosts in a computer network. The network
of locations serves as a unique and homogeneous platform, while the
underlying network of hosts may be heterogeneous and widely
distributed. Locations therefore have to guarantee independence from
the underlying hard- and software. To make the Mobile Agent System
an open platform, the system furthermore has to guarantee security
of hosts against malicious attacks. (User) Agents are active,
autonomous software objects, that reside (and are processed) on
locations. They can communicate with other agents either locally
inside one location or globally with agents on other locations.
Mobile Agents furthermore can migrate from one location to another.
Mechanisms for the communication between agents and for the
migration of agents have to be provided by the Mobile Agent System.
Service Agents are interfaces to services. Next to the normal
communication mechanisms between agents of the mobile agent system,
they have access to services provided by the underlying host.
Because of their machine dependent purpose, service agents are not
mobile. The Atomas project aims in developing an open agent system
as an enabling technology for the evolution of a electronic
marketplace. This report documents the achieved results of the first
year
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