CMU CS 15-675 Architectures for Software Systems Spring 1997

Agents and Mediators

Garlan & Shaw Questions on Readings for Lecture 22

Due: Monday, April 7, 1997

The papers:

[SD+96]: Sycara et al, Distributed Intelligent Agents

[Wh96]: White, General Magic White Paper on Telescript Technology

[Wie95]: Wiederhold. Mediation in Information Systems

Hints:

[Wie95] to get the basic concept about mediation.

In [Wh96], don't get caught up in language constructs. Focus on examples which show how to use mobile agents. Try to think of scenarios where mobile agents might be a huge win. Think about implmentation issues. How much state needs to be prserved for agents to be mobile?

In [SD96], try to focus on the architecture. Think about a different domain and how to use this architecture.

Questions:

1. Can you spot the use of implicit invocation in the paper by Sycara et.al.?

2. Consider the architecture of single agent in the paper by Sycara et.al. How hard is to make that agent mobile?

3. Consider the following scenario: an agent A needs to perform technical analysis on a stock. Unfortunately, the historical data for the stockis on a database present at the remote site. Does it make sense to use mobile agents here?

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Modified: 04/02/97