MDE and Mobile Agents: Another Reflection on the Agent Migration

Model driven engineering (MDE) is a software development approach family based on the use of models in the software construction. It allows the exploitation of models to simulate, estimate, understand, communicate and produce code. Mobile agents are a very interesting technology to develop applications for mobile and distributed environments. A mobile agent is essentially a computer program that acts autonomously on behalf of a user and travels through a network of heterogeneous computers. By moving to remote computers, the mobile agent processes data there and hence saves remote communications and local computation.Many mobile-agent platforms have been developed. While some of them have been abandoned, others continue to release new versions that fix bugs detected or offer new interesting features.In this paper, we present a reflection on how one can realize the migration operation when the mobile-agent applications are built using an MDE approach.