Research On The Mobile Agent-based Middleware Platform And Its Testing Model

Agent is a computing entity in the distributed system or collaborative system, characterized by the capability of autonomy, interaction, reactivity, pre-activeness, mobility and rationality. With the appearance of the concept of agent, researchers pay much attention on it and present a lot of agent platforms. Mobile agent is specially focused for its autonomy, low-bandwidth need and platform independent. The application of mobile agent is not ideal as its anticipation from the view of current research. Many problems such as security, integration, interoperability prevent the mobile agent from widely spreading which can't be solved by a perfect solution easily. It's the policy and trend for mobile agent to make up its weakness by integration with other matured technology to be dominant and mainstream in the community.CORBA is a standard of distributed object technology. CORBA isn't out of scope of RPC, it only moves the data to the computing side, but CORBA has its unique advantage, ORB is the core of CORBA and a middleware to forward the message with the character of independence of platform, security, reusability and integration of legacy system, which implements the seamless integration and interoperability of the objects. CORBA/IIOP is predominant in the technology and market and could solve the problem of legacy system interoperability. If mobile agent could play the role of client or server of CORBA to invoke method or provide service, which would enable CORBA to move the computing to the data side and promote the efficiency and flexibility of the CORBA application system, we can solve the problem of interoperability of mobile agent and legacy system and introduction of mobile agent to legacy system easily.Standard is the precondition of maturity of mobile agent and it is the main method to solve the problem of interoperability of mobile agent systems. There are nearly 100 mobile agent platforms for commerce or research in present. Those platforms are very different with system architecture and implementation, which prevents the application and interoperability of mobile agent systems severely. Many companies present their suggestion books about the standard of mobile agent to OMG, the newest and most influential of which is Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facility (MASIF) presented by Open Group, IBM, General Magic etc. MASIF only proposes standardization for agent and agent system names, for agent system types and for location syntax. It specifies two interfaces: the MAFAgentSystem interface provides operations for the management and transfer of agents, whereas the MAFFinder interface supports the localization of agents and MA systems in the scope of an administered locality. MASIF doesn't define the location mechanism of mobile agents in different regions and security of interoperability. FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agent) is the other organization for standard of agent, which also dedicates itself to establishing the specification of agent. FIPA concentrates on defining the language and protocol for communication and collaboration and administration of agent with different architecture. FTPA97, FIPA97 V2.0, FIPA98 V0.2, FIPA2000 has been issued and will be modified in the practice.How does we research the conformance testing based on mobile agent? How do different mobile agent products conform to the same standard to satisfy the standard of interoperability? Deeply progress of different mobile agent platform, these questions need to be answered urgently. The dissertation works on middleware based on mobile agent and its key technology and analyzes the advantage and limitation of current middleware technology, then designs a middleware platform based on mobile agent conform to current standard of mobile agent and presents a conformance testing models based on it and discusses its interoperability testing. The dissertation mainly studies and solves the following problems:1) We research the architecture of mobile agent based on mobile agent and present a solution to integrate the mobile agent with distributed object to solve the problem of software integration and interoperability, including the interoperability of agent system and agent system, agent system and non-agent system (legacy system).2) We research the mechanism of mobility, execution, communication and security of different mobileagent platforms in present including Java based and non-java based. We master the design principle and application pattern and trends of mobile agent and analyze its advantage and limitation and pay emphasis on the design of the middleware.3) We research the standard of MASIF and FIPA. Besides conformance to the standard, we also extendthe location mechanism and secure interoperability undefined by MASIF.4) We research how to progress the conformance testing based on mobile agent and how different mobile agent products conform to the same standard satisfy the standard of interoperabilityWe summarize the research before and present a middleware based on mobile agent (MMA) conform to standard of mobile agent to solve the problem of software integration and interoperability, including the interoperability of agent system and agent system, agent system and non-agent system (legacy system), which enhances the intelligence of bus in the distributed object systems. We deeply research the testing model based on mobile agent, too. In general, the major contributions of this dissertation include:1) We extend the location mechanism of mobile agent in different domain in MASIF.2) We extend the secure interoperability of MASIF.3) We present an abstract model of mobile agent environment based on labelled transition system and itsconformance testing. We also research the interoperability model of mobile agent.4) We summarize the research before and present three different interoperability patterns in our experiment and analyze their performance and compare it with each other. It will be helpful for the spread and application of mobile agentIn general, We will continue to work hard on architecture of interoperability of mobile agent system in our future work...