We have implemented a prototypical infrastructure supporting agent transport and communication for agents written in diverse languages, and there are diploma projects underway which examine various aspects of applications based on mobile agents. These pages document our approach, make several interesting publications available and contain links to related information. Mobile software agents are a new breed of computer software that connects activities and people together across the Internet. They enable individuals and enterprises to perform, coordinate and track complex processes over time across different computers on the Internet. The Ara Project Ara aims at the development of a portable and secure infrastructure for the execution of mobile agents in heterogeneous networks.
Mobile agents are programs with the ability to change their host machine during execution.
This enables them to handle interactions locally which conventionally had to be performed remotely. The currently huge development of portable computers and computing devices together with a rapidly expanding cord-less networking technology, pushes the software technology in the direction of designing new software products, taking this new 'paradigm' of computing into account. In a mobile environment the user should be able to move from one local area network to the other with f.ex. Floyd's major functions are finding out about the existence of other Floyds, discovering which Floyds are currently running, and discovering where particular people have been seen. The Data Interchange Facility is a facility supporting interoperability between objects.