A Framework for Design and Implementation for Mobile Active Objects

This paper describes the design and the implementation of the mobile active object framework whose aim is to support a methodology for developing event-driven lightweight mobile agents. Starting from a visual specification of the dynamic agent behavior based on Distilled StateCharts, the framework provides the rules by which to obtain an object-oriented design directly implementable as a composite object into a target language. Currently, the framework is implemented in Java in order to exploit the myriad of existing Java-based mobile object and agent systems for supporting execution, migration and interaction of mobile active objects.