Gypsy: a component-based mobile agent system

Abstract

Gypsy is a component-based, dynamically extensible environment for mobile agent systems. The runtime environment consists of lightweight servers that provide a distributed execution environment for agents, and a remote administration tool that supports the set-up and shutdown of servers and agents. A server hosts a number of places to which agents may move to execute their functions. Each place is specialized to support a particular service. A supervisor agent may contain several worker agents that may execute concurrently. A supervisor agent travels from place to place according to its itinerary and launches its workers at appropriate places. A mobile agent is the basic abstraction from which all other components, including servers and supervisor agents, are constructed. The primary goal of the Gypsy project is to build a multi-language, extensible environment for experimenting with mobile agents as a programming paradigm. The environment is implemented in Java and currently supports agents written in the Java or Python programming languages. This paper presents an overview of the Gypsy project, the current system architecture and the design of the important components of the Gypsy system.