On developing open mobile fault tolerant agent systems

The paper introduces the CAMA (Context-Aware Mobile Agents) framework intended for developing large-scale mobile applications using the agent paradigm. CAMA provides a powerful set of abstractions, a supporting middleware and an adaptation layer allowing developers to address the main characteristics of the mobile applications: openness, asynchronous and anonymous communication, fault tolerance, and device mobility. It ensures recursive system structuring using location, scope, agent, and role abstractions. CAMA supports system fault tolerance through exception handling and structured agent coordination within nested scopes. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated using an ambient lecture scenario - the first part of an ongoing work on a series of ambient campus applications. This scenario is developed starting from a thorough definition of the traceable requirements including the fault tolerance requirements. This is followed by the design phase at which the CAMA abstractions are applied. At the implementation phase, the CAMA middleware services are used through a provided API. This work is part of the FP6 IST RODIN project on Rigorous Open Development Environment for Complex Systems.