Mole – Concepts of a mobile agent system

Due to its salient properties, mobile agent technology has received a rapidly growing attention over the last few years. Many developments of mobile agent systems are under way in both academic and industrial environments. In addition, there are already various efforts to standardize mobile agent facilities and architectures. Mole is the first mobile agent system that has been developed in the Java language. The first version was finished in 1995, and since then Mole has been constantly improved. Mole provides a stable environment for the development and usage of mobile agents in the area of distributed applications. In this paper we describe the basic concepts of a mobile agent system, i.e., mobility, communication and security, discuss different implementation techniques, present the decisions made in Mole and give an overview of the system services implemented in Mole.