The requirements satisfied by Facile are common to different application domains, such as industrial automation, air traffic control, telecommunications and financial markets. Extensive experiments and demonstrative applications show that Facile or similar languages will be valuable tools for the implementation of the infrastructures that support applications in these domains. Behavioural descriptions capture essential static information about a program's potential dynamic behavior, in particular its potential for communication and for dynamic creation of processes. Thus behavior inference may provide a level of safety since only agents satisfying a behavior specified by the receiving side are accepted. Further properties may be captured in new type systems that guarantee safety and liveness properties in the same way as traditional type systems guarantee safety in calling functions and procedures.
Mobile agents are self-contained pieces of software that can move between computers on a network.
Agents can serve as local representatives for remote services, provide interactive access to data they accompany, and carry out tasks for a mobile user temporarily disconnected from the network. Mobile agents bring with them the fear of viruses, Trojan horses and other nasties. To avoid trouble of this kind, the main approach to agent-based systems involves the development of safe languages, i.e. languages that do not allow peek and poke, unsafe pointer manipulations and unrestricted access to file operations. This is often achieved through interpreted languages. Since an agent can move from place to place, it can be very hard to trace the execution of such systems and special care must be taken when constructing systems of this nature.