@mastersthesis{sharma:thesis, author = {Rohit Sharma}, title = {Mobile Agent Construction Environment}, year = {1997}, month = {June}, school = {Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College}, copyright = {Rohit Sharma}, group = {agents}, keyword = {mobile agents, visual programming}, abstract = {Transportable or mobile agents are autonomous pieces of code that can migrate from machine to machine in a heterogeneous network under their own control and can interact with other agents, and the resources on each host. Mobile-agent systems provide an interpreted language to write agents. Agent Tcl is an agent system, which provides a set of commands as an extension to Tcl. The aim of the Mobile Agent Construction Environment (MACE) is to simplify construction of mobile agents for distributed-computing applications like workflow-management systems. To provide program visualization and tuning capabilities, a graphical interface is required. MACE provides a visual language, which enables the user to provide an easily understandable representation of the workflow. Program development is automated by generating an Agent Tcl agent from fragments of code for individual modules of the distributed program. For program visualization and tuning purposes, MACE generates a log of the agent launched and animates the graphical the graphical representation of the workflow. A critical-path anlysis is also done for each launch.}, }