Agent Tcl: A transportable agent system

Agent Tcl is a transportable-agent system that is under development at Dartmouth College. A transportable agent is a named program that can migrate from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network. Such programs are a p o werful tool for implementing information agents since the electronic resources in a user's information space are often distributed across a network and can contain tremendous quantities of data. Sending a user-speciic program to the network location of the resource is often the most convenient and eecient alternative. The goal of Agent Tcl is to address the weaknesses of existing transportable-agent systems. Agent Tcl will run on standard hardware , support multiple languages and transport mechanisms, provide transparent migration and communication, and provide eeective security and fault-tolerance in the uncertain world of the Internet. This paper describes the architecture of Agent Tcl and its current implementation and presents four information-management applications in which Agent Tcl has proven useful.