Transportable Information Agents

Transportable agents are autonomous programs. They can move through a heterogeneous network of computers under their own control, migrating from host to host. They can sense the state of the network, monitor software conditions, and interact with other agents or resources. The network-sensing tools allow our agents to adapt to the network configuration and to navigate under the control of reactive plans. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the navigation system that gives our agents autonomy. We also discuss the intelligent and adaptive behavior of autonomous agents in distributed informationgathering tasks. 1 Introduction Modern information systems have data distributed over heterogeneous and unreliable networks. We wish to develop sophisticated methods for browsing, searching, and organizing distributed information systems. Traditional approaches to distributed information access co-locate the data and the computation needed to process it by bringing the data..