ADAPTIVE CLONING APPROACH TO AGENT MOBILITY

Abstract

Multi Agent Systems provide efficient solutions for several computational problems. Multi Agents systems are subject to performance bottlenecks in cases where agents cannot perform tasks by themselves due to insufficient resources. Solutions to such problems include passing tasks to others or agent migration to remote hosts. But, in this work, agent cloning used as an approach to the problem of local agent overloads. Agent cloning is the action of creating and activating a clout .agent (locally or remotely) to perform some or all of an agent's tasks. Agent cloning subsumes the task transfer and agent mobility. Agent migration can be implemented by creating a clone on a remote machine, transferring the tasks from the original agent to the clone, and dying. Thus agent mobility is an instance of agent cloning. The requirements of implementing a cloning mechanism and its benefits have been studied. The reasoning, decision-making, and actions necessary for an agent with in the system. to perform-cloning also have been studied. The merging of two agents or self-extinction of underutilized agents is also discussed. For large number of tasks, cloning significantly increases the portion of tasks performed by Multi Agent System. The program is written in Java under Linux operating system.