Core specification and experiments in DIET: a decentralised ecosystem-inspired mobile agent system

Mobile Agent systems have attracted considerable attention as means of exploring and manipulating distributed information sources. However, many existing multi-agent platforms present limitations in terms of adaptability and scalability, indicating difficulties when trying to replicate these results on a large scale. We describe the core of a novel mobile agent toolkit known as DIET, (Decentralised Information Ecosystem Technologies), which addresses some of these limitations and provides a foundation for an open, robust, adaptive and scalable agent ecosystem. We introduce DIET core features and describe how they support basic mobile agent capabilities such as migration and real-time interaction. We then illustrate how an ecosystem-inspired design approach differs from conventional design approaches. Finally, we experiment with a simple information retrieval scenario, demonstrating the emergence of agent communities through the evolution of environmental preferences. In this way we hope to clarify how applications built on this foundation could be used to tackle problems in adaptable and open real-world scenarios.