Task migration of JADE agents on Android platform

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are a software development paradigm suitable for dynamic and complex application domains. A noteworthy feature of many agent systems is the ability of agent migration. Agent migration procedure consists of two distinct steps; code migration and agent state migration. Migration of agent's state is a process of serializing agent's state and de-serializing it at destination. Migration of code is a more complex issue, due to heterogeneous nature of operating systems which can host agent platforms. A common approach is to implement an agent system in on a platform which is agnostic to the operating system and hardware. A popular language and a platform for such task is Java, which is also the language of choice for the Android platform. Byte-codes of Java virtual machine (JVM) and Android Dalvik virtual machine are not interchangeable. The paper presents agent platform JADE, agent mobility implementation and class loading mechanism in Android. Analysis of different approaches to dynamic class loading is conducted and task oriented approach implemented in prototype.