Standard Organizations

There are mainly two organizations involved in creating a standard for Mobile Agents.

OMG

The Object Management Group, Inc. [OMG] is an international organization to promote the theory and practice of object-oriented technology in software development. It developed the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). The standard developed by the OMG for Mobile Agents is called MASIF (Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facility). The next chapter will give a detailed description of this standard, as it is used in the TAgents Mobile Agent System.

FIPA

The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents [FIPA] is a non-profit association to promote the success of emerging agent-based applications, services and equipment. It is developing a specification for agent-based applications, services and equipment. The FIPA papers include also many parts on Mobile Agents.

The MASIF standard was used for this thesis because it was specially created for Mobile Agents, while the FIPA specification was generally designed for agent-based applications. Efforts are currently started to merge the MASIF and FIPA specification. The next versions of MASIF will be designed to reach interoperability between the different standards. This will enable MASIF compatible application to be as well FIPA compatible in the future.