Enabling FIPA Agents on Small Devices

The foreseen progress of the market of portable devices is demanding the realisation of increasingly complex applications for increasingly smaller and ubiquitous devices. This trend promotes the migration of technologies that were originally developed for desktop computers to mobile devices. This paper describes the current results of the LEAP project, a European-scale effort that aims at enabling FIPA agents on small devices. The LEAP project achieves its goal providing a FIPA-compliant agent platform that runs seamlessly on any Java-enabled device, from cellular phones to enterprise servers. This platform is naturally ubiquitous as it can be configured to run on any mobile or fixed device. The LEAP project has already released a first version of the platform to registered users for testing purposes and the second, and final, version will be released in open source by the end of this year. We tested the platform in a logistics scenario intended to provide mobile workers with "just-in-time information."