Maintenance of distributed systems with mobile agents

Abstract

We introduce the use of mobile agents for maintaining distributed heterogeneous systems with respect to monitoring and configuration. Code mobility can ensure the maintainability even for small and/or partially connected devices and scalability for highly distributed systems. Our approach leads to a system which allows to describe the jobs to perform in an abstract way. This is supported by a generalization of system parameters as well as the use of a rule-based decision system to describe the behavior of a mobile agent and its tasks. Application scenarios deploying our approach are illustrated showing the integration of different systems from PCs to embedded devices and even fieldbus nodes. Finally, differences to other approaches are discussed.