Multiagentsystem Ellipsis

Ellipsis is a modular, agent-oriented, and extendable toolkit to execute stationary and mobile software agents written in the Java programming language. Ellipsis uses the standard application server JBoss (version 4.2.3 GA) without any modifications.

In contrast to existing mobile agent toolkits, Ellipsis has an agent- and message-oriented architecture. Ellipsis is built on top of the JMX architecture. Core Ellipsis components are implemented as MBeans which provides for basic ser-vices to execute agents and control their life-cycle. One of the core components is a special MBean (AgentModul) that makes it possible to load an agent powered by agent engines. Agent engines can execute one type of agent. Based on this mechanism, agents can be added dynamically to a running system, can be stopped (for example in case of an error) and restarted later. Ellipsis already comes with a predefined set of agents, offering basic services like agency, loader, holdingarea and migration.