Managing agent life cycles in open distributed systems

Abstract

Large scale open, heterogeneous, distributed environments such as the Internet, are the environments in which (intelligent) agents need to be able to function and survive. These environments need to provide distributed support, including management services, for such agent systems. In this paper a local management architecture, implemented in AgentScape, is provided together with a management-oriented life cycle model. A major feature of this model is the central role of one of the states of the life cycle model, namely the "suspended" state: the state in which an agent is manageable. A prototype implementation of the management system based on the life cycle model is described.