Contracting and Moving Agents in Distributed Applications Based on a Service-Oriented Architecture

This paper presents a service-oriented platform for development and execution of distributed applications based on contracting stationary and migrating services. Services are seen as active objects build on top of a middleware using CORBA and added features. Customized services add to the middleware the ability to handle transparently application start-up and distribution according to load-balancing and inverse caching application demand. Services can be considered of any kind ranging from scientific specialized processing to data archiving juke-boxes. An application on system management in scientific experimental environment is driving the work on some aspects of the architecture and the management.

1996