Methods of the PlatformCommunicationIFace

The communication services need some methods from the System to transport Agents and transfer messages. Since these are special to the behavior of the communication services, please consult the Section on page for a more detailed description of the methods.

When an Agent requests to be sent to another Agent System it calls the move method of the communication service. To get the Agent in a safe state the communication service calls the prepareForMove of the platform. The platform then stops the Agent and returns a reference to it. When the transfer was OK it calls the method transferOK of the System which terminates the Agent because it now executes in the other Agent System.

The last method, receiveAgent, is called when a communication service gets a request to receive and restart an Agent from outside. This method checks first if the Agent is allowed to execute here and then creates it a new AgentLoader and AgentHelper. If all went OK, it is restarted and put into the agents Hashtable.