Transportable Information Agents

Transportable agents are autonomous programs. They can movethrough a heterogeneous network of computers migrating from host tohost under their own control. They can sense the state of thenetwork, monitor software conditions, and interact with other agentsor resources. The network-sensing tools allow our agents to adapt tothe network configuration and to navigate under the control ofreactive plans. In this paper we describe the design andimplementation of a transportable-agent system and focus on navigationtools that give our agents autonomy. We also discuss the intelligentand adaptive behavior of autonomous agents in distributed information-access tasks.