Context-dependent Coordination for Engineering Mobile Agent Applications

Mobility is both a feature and an intrinsic property of Internet agents. However, mobility calls for suitable coordination models and infrastructures. The talk introduces the concept of context-dependent coordination and shows how it can be enforced by a coordination infrastructure based on programmable local interaction spaces. The main underlying ideas are that (i) local interaction spaces associated to different execution environments can be independently programmed so as to lead to differentiated, environment-dependent behaviors, and (ii) mobile Internet agents can program the interaction spaces of the visited execution environments to obtain an application-dependent behavior of the interaction spaces themselves. The talk will show how context-dependent coordination represents a powerful framework for the analysis and design of Internet-agent systems, by promoting a more modular approach to analysis, design, and development.