Towards reflective mobile agents for resource-constrained mobile devices

The vision of ubiquitous computing is one in which resource constrained mobile devices form ad-hoc networks to enable the delivery of services that are sensitive and responsive to people. Such networks are dynamic and must be capable of dealing with uncertain information. As emergent system behaviour begins to evolve the complexity of pervasive systems increases. The agent development community have been addressing issues of complexity and uncertainty, within distributed computing, for several years. This paper details the migration process of Agent Factory Micro Edition (AFME), a minimised footprint agent platform for resource constrained mobile devices. The process enables agents to migrate from a resource rich environment to a resource constrained mobile device and vice versa. It requires agents to dynamically alter their form and behaviour so as to adapt to their context.