A performance model for task and interaction patterns in mobile agent systems

Mobile agents involve the migration of code and state, thereby facilitating the establishment of various communication and execution patterns in application programs. Automating the development of distributed systems that involve mobile agents is a nontrivial problem, requiring the developer to explicitly control and manage the complete environment, involving various host platforms and operating systems. Petri net models of design patterns in the Aglets mobile agent libraries are described, to support automated soft-ware engineering of mobile agent systems. The master-slave design pattern is described for modelling concurrent behaviour, and verified with an Aglets implementation.