A virtual machine for distributed agent-oriented programming
Bin Zhou, Hong Ping Zhu · Radar (Oxford Brookes University) · 2008
Abstract. Agent-orientation has been considered as a viable solution to the development of software systems in dynamic environments such as the Internet. This paper presents a high level language virtual machine CAVM designed for distributed agent-oriented programming in the Internet environment. The main features of the virtual machine (VM) are two-fold. First, the communication between agents is separated from computation so that communication is network transparent of agent location. Second, code deployment is separated from loading so that multiple agents of the same caste can be dynamically distributed to the network and dynamical integrated into the systems by adding new agents. The paper first reviews the key features of an agent-oriented programming language called CAOPLE. It then presents the design of the virtual machine to support the implementation of the language. Experiments with the performance of the system in a network environment are also reported. 1.