Software agents mobility using process migration mechanism in distributed Erlang

Abstract

Basic features of Erlang technology are very similar to the theoretical assumptions of the software agent paradigm. This fact encourages development of Erlang-based software agent systems and platforms. One of the lacking features of the Erlang technology, which is required in agent systems, is the ability to migrate agents between nodes of the agent platform. The feature of moving working processes can also be useful for solving particular problems in Erlang-based systems. In this paper the novel Erlang process migration mechanism is proposed. It is fully transparent, and it provides code migration and messages forwarding. The solution has been used for implementing an agent migration mechanism in an Erlang-based software agent platform (eXAT). It has been intensively tested and compared in terms of durability and performance with the most popular Java based agent platform.