Bali: A live desktop for mobile agents

Abstract

As one of the tools for our mobile agent system, Aglets, we developed a desktop-like visual shell, called Bali, to allow natural and intuitive handling of mobile agents. By nature however, mobile agents are autonomous programs. The speed at which an agent executes its own program is very fast in comparison with the speed at which humans operate. Therefore, it is hard for a user to control an aglet's behavior through a GUI that is extended straightforwardly from a static object based desktop to a dynamic agent based desktop. But if we renounce control of aglets, the significance of the desktop metaphor will be lost. We propose a way of extending the desktop metaphor to an agent based desktop, introducing Bali as a visual shell whose design is based on two basic agent specific concepts: Hooking of agents' execution and separation of the executing environment by provision of multiple environments. As an example, we outline our GUI and its inner structure and introduce our system, Aglets.