Mobile agents

Welcome to the proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Agents. MA 2002 took place in Barcelona, Spain and was co-located with the 4th International Workshop on Mobile Agents for Telecommunications Applications. Both events were held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, October 22–25, 2002. Mobile agents may be de? ned as programs that, with varying degree of - tonomy, can move between hosts across a network. Mobile agents combine the notions of mobile code, mobile computation, and mobile state. Capabilities of mobile agents include: – Supporting unrealiable networks and disconnected operation – Counteracting low-bandwidth, high-latency communication links – Deploying newbehaviour (through mobile code) and recon? guring systems on-the-? y – Distributing processing load across systems – Improving survivability in the face of network and system failure. Given the above capabilities, mobile agents (while they may not be referred to as such) are nowbecoming accepted as a fundamental architectural construct for the design and development of complex adaptive systems that need to operate in highly dynamic environments. Mobile agents also support applications in several domains such as ubiquitous computing, grid computing, remote sensing, data mining, system management, and agile computing.