Support for Unique Identification Mobile agents as well as agent systems have to be uniquely identifiable in the scope of the entire agent environment. Thus, special support is required for the generation of unique agent and agent system identifiers. An important requirement is the support of correct and reliable execution of agents in presence of concurrency and occurrence of failures. Therefore, transaction support must be provided. Communication Support Agents should be able to communicate with each other as well as with platform services.
Several mechanisms are possible, such as messages, method invocation or a blackboard mechanism.
Furthermore, agent communication includes support for semantic analysis. Basic Capabilities of Mobile Agent Platforms Further functional requirements may rise depending on concrete applications. However, these additional features should be separated from the basic, inevitable capabilities mentioned above. 1 shows the abstract structure of an agency, comprising several services in order to fulfil the functional requirements identified above. Note that some of the services provide remote interfaces in order to be accessible by external actors, such as other agencies, agents, or even human users.