A Research And Implementation Of Mobile Agent Based Information Retrieving System

As the growth and heterogeneity of networks and Internet, it is quite important and also very difficult to profit information resources efficiently from Internet. Researchers are trying to utilize Mobile Agent technology to solve problems in information searching in Internet. Agent is a kind of programme or computing entity that can apperceive the environment under a certain environment and can delegate its designer or user to realize some goals. Mobile agents are agents with moving characteristic, which can automatically move from one machine to another and can delegate the user to accomplish customed task. Mobile agent involves many technology domains, such as computer network, distributed system, and artificial intellegence etc. It has been applied in the distributed system under Internet environment for its characteristic of moving, autonomy and collaboration, and manifested great application perspectives and advantages.The main purpose of the thesis is to explore the concrete application of mobile agent technology in Internet enviroment and study the problems and their solutions when we apply mobile agent technology in software development. Having studied the basic concepts and appliction charateristics of mobile agent, we analysed in detail the software development method based on mobile agent technology, and then proposed a model to design an information retrieving system MADBRE (Mobile Agent based DataBase REtrieving system) in Internet using mobile agent technology. We also studied and analyzed design and implementation of the system in detail, especially the security and fault tolerance mechanisms in the system. The contributions of our research work and the thesis are: (1) We analysed entirely concepts, characteristics, and functionalities of mobile agent technology, and discussed the design model of mobile agent system according to the object oriented style and the programming methods based mobile agent technology.(2) We studied the framework of a database information retrieving system in Internet using mobile agent technology. We implemented the fault tolerance and security mechanisms in the system. We also designed and implemented a docking system to solve the problem of moving invalidation of mobile agents and a communication support system to solve the problem of communication invalidation of mobile agents.(3) We studied and compared different solutions of implementing distributed information retrieving system in Internet, and analysed the advantages and drawbacks in developping distributed application systems using mobile agent technology.