Framework for hierarchical mobile agents: Toward service-oriented agent compound

Hierarchical mobile agent model is an emerging extension to traditional agent models, where an agent can migrate into another agent and establish a strong partnership. The entering agent and accepting agent are called as a child and its parent, respectively. This model enables agents to establish the strong (parent-child) partnership and cooperate with each other while maintaining the partnership stable for a long term. This work discusses requirements for frameworks that support development of HMA applications, and describes the basic direction of our proposed HMA framework named MAFEH. MAFEH includes two features: (1) Parent-Child Agreement that specifies an agreement regarding behaviors of a parent and its child, and (2) Interaction Behaviors Description that is used to specify typical synthesis actions separated from the main application logic. Supporting these features, MAFEH aims to facilitate development of an agent system where each agent can obtain required functions on demand by means of synthesis as well as remote interaction. This work considers multimedia application as a motivating scenario, where an agent encapsulates a multimedia content and establishes synthesis with various agents encapsulating other contents or additional services.