Agents.

The focus of this chapter is in mobile agent technologies. A comprehensive overview of the theoretical foundation of intelligent and mobile agent related research is given along with a condensed historiography of this relatively new field. An in depth look of the more technical aspects of commercially available mobile agent platforms is provided in the second half of this chapter. The overview given there allows the reader to gain a unifying perspective of the technologies and capabilities involved and to view mobile agent platforms as a middleware both overlapping and complementing distributed object technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]