An economic model for medical data retrieval using mobile software agents

Mobile agents (MAs) are software entities capable of autonomous migration from host to host within a computer network. The economic-market (EM) model (in which hosts set prices for resources and negotiate access with MAs using a form of currency), is a promising approach to distributed control in MA systems. The paper discusses the use of an EM model in a medical data retrieval MA application. MAs analyse biopsy-proven mammographic cases stored in digital medical libraries throughout the Internet and return only the cases that are most relevant to a case of interest. A simple prototype has been developed, in which hosts price CPU time according to local CPU load, and MAs seek to minimise their expenditures by migrating to a lightly loaded host to perform a CPU-intensive task. The results to date are presented and a number of aspects of EM system design discussed in the context of the proposed application.