Growing recognition of the benefits of mobile agents in distributed systems, such as military C4ISR, has led to a proliferation
of mobile agent systems. However, incompatibilities between proprietary systems prevent the greater potential benefits of
ubiquitous mobile agent computing. In particular, agents cannot migrate to a host that runs a different mobile-agent system.
Prior approaches to interoperability have tried to force agents to use a common API and so far none have succeeded. This goal
led to our efforts to develop mechanisms that support runtime interoperability of mobile-agent systems. This paper describes
the Grid Mobile-Agent System, which allows agents to migrate to different mobile-agent systems.
This research was supported by the DARPA CoABS Program (contracts F30602-98-2-0107, F30602-98-C-0170 and F30602-98-C-0162
for Dartmouth, UWF, and Lockheed Martin respectively) and by the DoD MURI program (AFoSR contract F49620-97-1-03821 for both
Dartmouth and Lockheed Martin). The contact author is Thomas Cowin tcowin@ai.uwf.edu.
The Mobile Agent System List identifies systems that do and do not comply with MASIF and other standards. The list is at http://mole.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/mal/mal.html