Virtual university-oriented cooperative mobile agent middleware

Abstract

The autonomy, cooperativity, intelligence and mobility of mobile agents make them overcome the weakness of the traditional distributed computation mode of C/S and B/S, and bring new innovative solutions to the collaborative teaching, collaborative learning and collaborative management in virtual universities. However, nowadays most of the research in mobile agent technology in terms of the Virtual University is mostly focused on a certain application for some particular users. As a result, these researches do not provide an effective control mechanism for the universal management of multiapplication agents that work for the multiusers with multicharacters. This has prevented the implementation and promulgation of agent technology in virtual universities. As far as such insufficiency is concerned, this paper demonstrates its own solution. In this paper, a Virtual University-Oriented cooperative Mobile Agent Middleware (VUMAM) and a Virtual University framework based on VUMAM are designed. In addition, the paper discusses the assignment of agent characters and function, agent naming, the control mechanism of cooperative agents and the extendability of VUMAM.