MAGNITUDE
Mobile
AGents Negotiating for ITinerant Users in the Distributed Enterprise
Summary
Magnitude (Mobile AGents Negotiating for ITinerant Users in the
Distributed Enterprise) is funded by EPSRC as part of the Distributed
Information Management
programme and by Qinetiq (formely, the Defence Evaluation and
Research Agency
DERA). The aim of this research is to design and build the software
infrastructure which allows mobile users to access information
while they are on the move.
We make use of mobile agents, which are software entities capable
of changing location in the course of their execution, and which
act as proxies to mobile sers. Mobile agents access information
by interacting with the infrastructure, whereas the infrastructure
hosts recommendation services that suggest ocuments that are related
to the document currently visualised by the user. We foresee a
very dynamic environment where information sources are represented
by software agents that take part in auctions in order to "buy''
space in the user's recommendation space. The novelty of our approach
is to use this market metaphore, which is particularly suitable
to address the problem of scarce resource allocation, to select
the best recommendations for the user. Our study focuses on the
market mechanism design, the bidding strategies for the agents,
and their evaluation through simulations and trials.
Security is also another important aspect of this project because
information
has to be delivered to users in a secure manner; our work focuses
on designing the algorithms to ensure that mobile agents are not
tempered with, when they operate in untrusted environments.
People
Principal investigator: Luc
Moreau,
Co-Investigators: David
De Roure, Wendy
Hall and Nicholas
Jennings
PhD Students: Norliza Zaini, Wei
Yan Zheng, Victor
Tan
Publications
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm/projects/magnitude/papers.html
Proposal
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm/projects/magnitude/proposal.html
Final Report
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~lavm/projects/magnitude/final-report.pdf
