Agent Migration as an Optional Service in an Extendable Agent Toolkit Architecture

In this paper we report on first experiences with a new software architecture for agent toolkits. Agent toolkits mainly consist of a software system that defines an agency, which is responsible to host software agents. Most architectures developed so far already define a large set of services, for example for agent migration, communication, and tracking. We propose to employ a kernel-based approach, where the kernel only provides fundamental concepts and functions common in all toolkits and abstracts from any of these services. We were able to show that in particular agent migration can be implemented as an optional service. We believe that this architecture is a useful foundation for research on agent-related topics as it allows research groups to implement their own results as a service which can be used by other groups running an agent system based on the same architecture.