Biologically inspired obsolescence management in mobile agent systems: A dynamic, service oriented approach

Ubiquitous computing heralds an era marked by the increasing pervasiveness of computational hardware throughout a given environment. In order to capitalize on the increased abundance of the underlying infrastructure multi-agent systems will be required to reflect the characteristics of the ubiquitous networks upon which they operate. Due to the potential for limited communication capacity experienced by agents in the wild it will become increasingly important for mobile agents to migrate to devices in greater proximity to the problem upon which they are working or the resources they require. A result of highly mobile agents operating in potentially constrained computational and communication environments is that widely used command and coordination structures are no longer able to scale efficiently. Engineers are currently struggling with aspects of managing the physical devices which comprise such networks, particularly the obsolescence management of their constituent, highly dispersed, hardware. Analogously, the obsolescence management of deployed agents is of increasing concern. The paper examines and synthesizes several biological metaphors which may be employed in order to mitigate the inherent complexity of managing deployed mobile agent systems and presents this functionality in a service oriented manner.