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Mobile Agents and Exploration

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Algorithms

  • 68 Accesses

Years and Authors of Summarized Original Work

  • 1952; Shannon

Problem Definition

How can a network be explored efficiently with the help of mobile agents? This is a very broad question and to answer it adequately it will be necessary to understand more precisely what mobile agents are, what kind of networked environment they need to probe, and what complexity measures are interesting to analyze.

Mobile Agents

Mobile agents are autonomous, intelligent computer software that can move within a network. They are modeled as automata with limited memory and computation capability and are usually employed by another entity (to which they must report their findings) for the purpose of collecting information. The actions executed by the mobile agents can be discrete or continuous and transitions from one state to the next can be either deterministic or non-deterministic, thus giving rise to various natural complexity measures depending on the assumptions being considered.

Network Model

The...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Carleton, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Evangelos Kranakis

  2. Department of Computer Science, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA

    Danny Krizanc

Authors
  1. Evangelos Kranakis
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  2. Danny Krizanc
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Ming-Yang Kao

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Kranakis, E., Krizanc, D. (2016). Mobile Agents and Exploration. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2864-4_242

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