| In service-based systems, various capabilities are provided by different organizations as services, which normally reside on geographically distributed network hosts. These services are often utilized by distributed software agents, which collaboratively invoke proper services following specific workflows to achieve application users' goals. These agents need to be deployed on hosts with respect to various deployment requirements which determine the hosts the agents need to be installed, activated, deactivated, updated, and uninstalled under various situations. Three important types of deployment requirements are considered in this dissertation: the access permissions of the agents to hosts, the communication bandwidth between hosts and agents, and the reliability of the system. Deploying these agents manually is often time-consuming and error-prone, and cannot effectively handle agents generated in runtime. Furthermore, in order to satisfy deployment requirements, an agent may need to be moved from one host to another under certain situation due to changes in environments. Hence, an agent deployment mechanism should support automated agent deployment and migration while satisfying deployment requirements for service-based systems.;In this dissertation, an approach was developed for automated agent deployment in service-based systems satisfying the deployment requirements provided by application users, service providers, and network administrators. In this approach, the major components include a Graphical User Interface (GUI) tool, a constraint generator, a plan generator, and a controller synthesizer. The GUI tool can facilitate developers to rapidly analyze deployment requirements and specify deployment policies. The constraint generator can automatically generate deployment constraints from deployment policies. The plan generator can generate an agent deployment plan satisfying all the deployment constraints. Based on the generated agent deployment plan, a set of controllers can be synthesized by the controller synthesizer and compiled to executable code to control agent deployment and migration in runtime. |
