No abstract

The goal of this paper is to summarize research in designing and developing an application framework for intelligent and mobile agents. Agents are the next significant software abstraction; they will soon be as ubiquitous as graphical user interfaces are today. The major contribution of the work described here is a reusable design and implementation of an architecture that addresses all levels of agent behavior. The design is robust and well founded, based on object oriented design patterns. The framework has been employed in preliminary applications in network management and enterprise integration. However, agent systems are still evolving; to facilitate future development, the framework is documented with patterns.