Simplifying Mobile Agent Development through Reactive Mobility by Failure

Nowadays, Java-based platforms are the most common proposals for building mobile agent systems using web technology. However, the weak mobility model they use, the lack of adequate support for supporting inference and reasoning, added to the inherent complexity of developing location aware software, impose strong limitations for developing mobile intelligent agent systems. In this article we present MoviLog, a platform for building Prolog-based mobile agents with a strong mobility model. MoviLog is an extension of JavaLog, an integration of Java and Prolog, that allows a user to take advantage of the best features of the programming paradigms they represent. MoviLog provides logic modules, called Brainlets, which are able to migrate among different web sites, either proactively or reactively, to use the available knowledge in order to find a solution. The most interesting feature introduced by MoviLog is the reactive mobility by failure (RMF) mechanism. This mechanism acts when a specially declared Prolog predicate fails, by transparently moving a Brainlet to another host which has declared the same predicate to try to satisfy the current goal.