Need of a Standard

The number of different Mobile Agent Systems has been increasing during the last few years. The industry is getting more and more interested in the field of Mobile Agents and building its own platforms for them. Mobile Agent Platform are built in interpreted language like Telescript, TCL/TK or Java. So we face now the problem of different systems being written in different languages with no possibility to interact or communicate between each other.

Therefore a standard had to be defined to achieve a standardized way of providing information about Agents and Platforms, and also to provide a standard way of interaction between them. Because of the use of different languages and protocols, the method chosen to be used in the standard was CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) [CORBA]. CORBA provides a way of inter-process communication, which is independent from the language and the operating system. The communication is done by the capability of calling methods of a different program, written in a different language, and on a different computer through the standardized mechanism of CORBA. CORBA is used as the so called middle ware between the different Agent Systems.

The Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facility [MASIF98] was developed by the Object Management Group [OMG], which also developed the CORBA standard.