ATL Postmaster: A system for agent collaboration and information dissemination

Most of the mobile agent work at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) uses agents for information retrieval and dissemination. We have found that our two dominant sources of cost are bandwidth and services (e.g. database accesses). We designed the ATL Postmaster system to reduce these costs. The Postmaster system sits on top of other mobile agents systems and provides tools for agent collaboration and information dissemination. There is a Postmaster resident on every machine that agents may visit. When an agent jumps to a new machine, it checks in with that machine's Postmaster. The agent gives the Postmaster its itinerary, and the Postmaster returns a possibly altered itinerary. A Postmaster may choose to reroute an agent if it knows a less-expensive alternate location the agent can visit to collect the same information. The Postmaster also provides a means for agents to share information with each other.