Modeling mobile agent systems with high level Petri nets

The paper presents a Petri net based approach for architectural modeling of mobile agent systems. An agent template (net) is proposed to model a changing number of autonomous and communicative software agents. An agent space is explicitly abstracted as a component, consisting of mobility environment (system net), agent templates (agent nets), and internal connector (net). Agent transfer is naturally captured by transition firing. To assure the strong mobility, the agent's state is delivered during migration. Agent mobility in OMG's MASIF is also examined by formalizing the interoperable agent system architecture.