Abstract
The comparatively recent move towards smartphones, and along with this new operating systems, such as Android, opens up new opportunities and offers potential to build new mobile agent-based applications.
Android gives applications access to a wide-ranging set of sensors and different communication channels – realizing the notion of nomadic computing – and supports a concurrent application layout based on loosely coupled components. This combination makes it particularly suitable for agent-based applications. Yet, it has several limitations: Android is not a multi-agent system on its own behalf and does not consistently employ loose coupling to give access to its capabilities.
To address those concerns we have ported our lightweight μ-agent framework μ 2 to the Android platform and directly interfaced it with Android platform facilities. This offers mutual benefits: agent-based applications can access Android functionality in a loosely coupled and unified fashion, while at the same time allowing the developer to consistently think in an agent-oriented manner. Android can use the μ-agent platform as a lightweight middleware module to build distributed applications in a hybrid fashion.
We present our system architecture, called Micro-agents on Android or MOA, and describe an example application using this approach as well as a performance benchmark. We further outline potential application areas and contrast it to existing approaches to build multi-agent applications on Android.
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Frantz, C., Nowostawski, M., Purvis, M.K. (2012). Micro-agents on Android: Interfacing Agents with Mobile Applications. In: Dechesne, F., Hattori, H., ter Mors, A., Such, J.M., Weyns, D., Dignum, F. (eds) Advanced Agent Technology. AAMAS 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7068. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27216-5_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27216-5_37
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