Transportable Information Agents

We have designed and implemented autonomous software agents. Autonomous software agents navigate independently through a heterogeneous network. They are capable of sensing the network configuration, monitoring software conditions, and interacting with other agents. Autonomous agents are implemented as transportable programs, e.g., programs that are capable of suspending execution, moving to a different machine, and starting from where they left off. We illustrate the intelligent behavior of autonomous agents in the context of distributed information-gathering tasks