| Agent Migration Between Incompatible Platforms |
Several agent platforms of general purpose exist, e.g., Voyager and Grasshopper, each of which provide an environment for building and executing software agents. Unfortunately, the common rule is that these platforms are incompatible with each other. Thus, agents built for one platform cannot be used in another platform. In addition, they can not interact with agents in other platforms. Some effort is put into standardizing agent communication and migration in FIPA and in OMG but these standards are not yet supported by most of the existing platforms. Moreover, it is questionable whether all agent platform vendors will support these standards in the near future. Therefore, we should find some other ways to allow interaction between agents in different platforms.
In this paper we will show that it is possible to make platform independent agents that are able to migrate between incompatible platforms, for example, between Voyager and Grasshopper. In addition, we will describe how to deliver messages to agents in other platforms so that it is transparent to the sender. We will also describe how to build platform independent service agents so that they can be used through normal method calls. Many of these ideas have already been tested successfully in our prototype implementation for Voyager and Grasshopper platforms.