Borg Research

These pages talk about the development and the research we are performing in the field of mobile multi-agent systems. A mobile multi-agent is a standalone component which is able to communicate with other agents and which can migrate to other places (processors). A mobile multi-agent systems is the architecture (or the operating system) which executes these kind of 'agents'. The research which is documented here mainly focuses on the distribution aspect of mobile multi-agent systems. We have no intent in designing the actual cooperating agents themselves, which is done in parts of the AI community. Our main focus is conceiving a system which allows mobile agent programmers to write their agents in, in a way which is defenitely more easy and more understandeble than using current day distributed architectures, without the hassle of having to take care of rather low level and non appropriate details.

In a broader view we are researching how we can bring distribution in all its aspects to a higher more conceptual level, such that designing applications in wide area networks becomes easier. This includes things like as shielding the programmer from finding its communication partners, how communication takes place, how programs can migrate in a location transparent way as well as more conceptual things such as how programs in wide area networks can be made secure, how transaction and replication are managed and how distributed programs should be conceived. The main questions we ask ouselves is how all these aspects can be integrated in a programming language and how we, with such a programming language in mind, design distributed applications.

The approach we use is a bottom up approach in which we first conceived a suitable language in which we don't have to take care of aspects as serializing and routering of messages. This task is more or less finished and now we are looking in what way we can design highly structured distributed applications in a way which separates the functional requirements of the program. For example, how we can abstrahate the control flow of the program in a set of reuasable components in a practical way.

Another track of research focuses on the impact security has on distributed systems. Writing distributed systems is one, writing secure distributed systems is difficult, writing secure distributed programs in wide area networks, which are protected against there interpreting environment is probably one of the most difficult things which one can do in the field of security. With this work we hope to have a good understanding of combining distributed aspects with other aspects such as security (and eventually others, like transaction and resource management). In the end we hope to create a system and a design methodolgy which is able to take different views upon all these aspects and which is able to combine them as needed, without too much hassle.

To be able to do this kind of research we needed an architecture which gives us the abbility to write mobile multi-agents in. One can think of creating a library which allows these kind of things but the problems we faced were of the kind which didn't allowed us to write one for mobile multi-agents. We tried to do this in Java, with java RMI. After all, Java is a beautiful language (at first sight) and especially Java RMI looked very promissing because we didn't have to take care of serialising objects. The main drawback of Java (and other languages) is the unability to migrate a process to another processor. (technically speaking, we were unable to migrate a Java thread to another java virtual machine). So finally we decided to adapt an existing virtual machine to our needs.

The virtual machine we had to our disposal was Pico [http://pico.vub.ac.be/], an educational language developed by Theo D'Hondt. We choose it because it's small, we had an implementation available and students know how to use it, so we can use it to teach distributed systems with it. We named the result Borg.

If you want to know more (please fund my account 001-2797205-92 with the message 'carry on the good work' :-)

0. General Use of Mobile Agent Systems


Title: Applicability Of Mobility, a Case Study
Auteur: Frederik Nyssens
Date: '00 - '01
File: thesis/FrederikNyssens.ps.gz
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Title: Applicability Of Mobility, are Mobile Agents Useful
Auteur: Frederik Nyssens
Date: '00 - '01
File: presentations/Mobility[Thesis].ppt.gz
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Title : Borg voor Palm
Auteur: Dimitri Verspecht
Date : Presented at Prog 16 November 01
File :  presentations/Pda[Prog16-11-01].ppt.gz
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Title: Mobile Agents On Mobile Platforms
Auteur: Dimitri Verspecht
Date: '01 - '02
File: thesis/DimitriVerspecht.pdf
File :  presentations/Borg[Prog20-06-02].ppt.gz
 
 

1. The Borg Mobile Multi Agent System

Title : Experiences in Mobile Computing: The CBorg Mobile Multi Agent System
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Johan Fabry
Date : Presented at Tools Europe 2001, Maart 2001
File :  papers/Borg[ToolsEurope2001].ps.gz
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Title : Experiences in Mobile Computing
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Johan Fabry, Karsten Verelst,Theo D'Hondt
Date : Presented at Tools Europe 2001, Maart 2001
File :  presentations/Borg[ToolsEurope2001].sdd.gz
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Title : The CBorg Mobile Multi Agent System
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Karsten Verelst, Theo D'Hondt
Date : Oktober 2001, Accepted at Agents2001, but send in too late.
File :  papers/Borg[_Agents2001].ps.gz
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Title : Ontwikkeling van een Mobiele Multi Agent Architectuur
Auteur: Werner Van Belle
Date : '96 - '97
File :  thesis/WernerVanBelle.ps.gz
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Title : The CBorg Mobile Agent Systems; An Overview
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Karsten Verelst, Johan Fabry, Theo D'Hondt
Date : Presented in Nantes 06/'01
File :  presentations/Borg[Nantes06-00].ppt.gz
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Title : The CBorg Mobile Multi Agent Systems; An Overview
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Karsten Verelst, Theo D'Hondt
Date : Presented for Luc Stoops at Prog; August '00
File :  presentations/Borg[Prog08-00].ppt.gz
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Title : Gevalstudie Mobiele Multi-Agent Systemen; CBorg
Auteur: Werner Van Belle
Date : Presented at Leuven (Seescoa kick-off meeting); Oktober '99
File :  presentations/Borg[Seescoa10-99].ppt.gz
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Title : Positie Optimalisaties Mobiele Multi-Agent Systemen; stand van zaken
Auteur: Werner Van Belle (2U)
Date : Presented at Prog; November '98
File :  presentations/Borg[Prog11-98].ppt.gz
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Title : Gevalstudie Mobile Multi-Agent Systemen; Borg
Auteur: Werner Van Belle
Date : Presented in Leuven December '98 by Werner and Karsten (who didn't know he would present something, nor what he would present :-)
Date : Presented for FKFO; December '98 by Theo D'Hondt (who didn't even looked at the slides before hand :-)
File :  presentations/Borg[Leuven12-98].ppt.gz
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Title : Gevalstudie Mobile Multi-Agent Systemen; Borg
Auteur: Werner Van Belle
Date : Presented for FKFO in Antwerpen December '99
File :  presentations/Borg[Antwerpen12-98].ppt.gz
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Title : Pool2001 Borg Overview
Auteur: Dirk van Deun, Karsten Verelst
Date : Presented for POOL2001 students
File :  presentations/Borg[POOL2001].sdw.gz
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Title : Borg: a way to hapiness in distributed environments; differences with pico
Auteur: Werner Van Belle
Date : Presented at the Prog Prototype meetings december 2001
File :  presentations/Borg[Prog02-12-01].sdd.gz
 
 

2. Reflection and Computational State

Title : Agent Mobility and Reification of Computational State
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Theo D'Hondt
Date : Presented at FKFO Meeting November '98
Date : Presented at FKFO Meeting September '99
File :  papers/Reification[Fkfo99].pz.gz
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Title : Agent Mobility and Reification of Computational State, an experiment in migration
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Theo D'Hondt
Date : Juni 2000, published at Agents 2000, Barcelona, Spain
In: Infrastructure for Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Scalable Multi-Agent Systems
Publisher: Springer Verlag
Series: Lecture Notes in Artifical Intelligence 1887
File :  papers/Reification[Agents2000].ps.gz
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Title : Agent Mobility and Reification of Computational State
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Theo D'Hondt
Date : published at Ecoop 2000, workshop 23, Maart 2000
File :  papers/Reification[Ecoop2000ws23].ps.gz
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Title : Agent Mobility; Reification of the Computational State
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Theo D'Hondt
Date : presented at Ecoop 2000, workshop 23, Maart 2000
File :  presentations/Migration[Ecoop2000ws23].ppt.gz
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Title : The Reflective Virtual Machine
Auteur: Karsten Verelst, Werner Van Belle, Theo D'Hondt
Date : submitted at Reflection 2001, 15 Maart 2001
File :  papers/Reflective[_Reflection2001].ps.gz
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Title : The Reflective Virtual Machine
Auteur: Karsten Verelst
Date : presentation presented at prog 11/00
File :  presentations/Reflective[Prog11-00].ppt.gz
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Title : The Reflective Virtual Machine
Auteur: Karsten Verelst
Date : submitted at Inet-Sec 2001, 25 mei 2001
File :  papers/Reflective[Fkfo2001].ps.gz
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Title : Jit Compiler voor Pico
Auteur: Paul Henri van der Steichel
Date : presented at Prog 26/10/01
File :  presentations/Jit[Prog26-10-01].ppt.gz
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Title : Jit Compiler voor Pico
Auteur: Paul Henri van der Steichel
Date : presented at Prog 21/12/01
File :  presentations/Jit[Prog21-12-01].ppt.gz
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Title : Reflectie door middel van Jit-compilatie
Auteur: Paul Henri van der Steichel
Date : '01-'02
File :  thesis/PaulHenriVanDerSteichel
File :  presentations/Jit[Prog20-06-02].ppt.gz
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Title : Distributed Serving of Applications using Agents
Auteur: Koen Bailleul
Date : '01-'02
File :  thesis/KoenBailleul.ps.gz
 
 

3. Routing

Title : Reinforcement Learning as a Routing Technique for Mobile Multi Agent Systems
Auteur: Werner Van Belle
Date : January '98
File :  papers/Routing[].ps.gz
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Title : Location Transparant Routing in Mobile Agent Systems Merging Name Lookups with Routing
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Karsten Verelst, Theo D'Hondt
Date : Presented at Future Trends of Distributed Computer Systems December '99
File :  papers/Routing[Ftdcs99].ps.gz
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Title : Location Transparant Routing in Mobile Agent Systems; Merging Name Lookups with Routing
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Karsten Verelst, Theo D'Hondt
Date : Presented at Future Trends of Distributed Computer Systems December '99
File :  presentations/Routing[Ftdcs99].ppt.gz
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Title : Shagger: a Distributed File-sharing Community with Transparent User Management and Adaptive Replication
Auteur: Wim Boffe
Remark: Altough this thesis has nothing to do with Borg, it offers some insights how networks of agents could be made to work.
Date : '00-'01
File :  thesis/WimBoffe.ps.gz
 
 

4. Synchronization/Control Flow Glueing

Title : Synchronization & Communication in Mobile Multi Agent Systems CSP Revisited
Auteur: Karsten Verelst, Werner Van Belle
Date : submitted at Ecoop 2000, workshop 7, Maart 2000
File :  papers/Sync[Ecoop2000ws7].ps.gz
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Title : A Study of Communication Models For Mobile Multi Agent Systems
Auteur: Karsten Verelst
Date : '98 - '99
File :  thesis/KarstenVerelst.ps.gz
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Title : Combining Components using Control Flow Components
Auteur: Philippe Demaecker
Date : '99 - '00
File :  thesis/PhilippeDemaecker.ps.gz
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Title : Glue Components and Meta Level Architectures
Auteur: Philippe Demaecker
Date : Thesis Presentation July '00
File :  presentations/Glueing[Thesis].ppt.gz
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Title : Glueing Components in Wide Area Networks
Auteur: Werner Van Belle
Date : Presented at Prog; November '00
File :  presentations/ReturnContinuation[Prog11-00].ppt.gz
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Title : Control Flow Structures in Distributed Programs
Auteur: Philippe Demaecker
Date : Presented at Prog (Stagepresentatie); Oktober '99
File :  presentations/Glueing[Stage].ppt.gz
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Title : Is Message Sending Good Enough ? Communication and Synchronisation revisited
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Karsten Verelst, Kristof Van Buggenhout, Theo D'Hondt
Date : Accepted at Ecoop2001. 20 Juni '01
File :  papers/Sync[Ecoop2001ws17].ps.gz
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Title : About the lack of Concurrency Control Primitives in Distributed Object Systems
Auteur: Werner Van Belle
Date : Presented at Ecoop2001. 20 Juni '01
File :  presentations/Sync[Ecoop2001ws17].ppt.gz
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Title : Taking Transactions to a Higher Level
Auteur: Johan Fabry
Date : Presented at Ecoop2001. 20 Juni '01
File :  presentations/Transactions[Ecoop2001ws17].ppt.gz
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Title : Concurrency Guarding and Error Resolution; Genetic Programming
Auteur: Werner Van Belle
Date : Presented at Prog 28 September 01
File :  presentations/Concurrency[Prog28-09-01].ppt.gz
File :  presentations/Concurrency[Prog28-09-01].sdd.gz
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Title : Communicatie in Gedistribueerde Systemen
Auteur: Kristof Van Buggenhout
Date : Presented at Prog 16 November 01
File :  presentations/Concurrency[Prog16-11-01].ppt.gz
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Title : An experiment in Automatic Adaptor Generation by Means of Evolution
Auteur: Werner Van Belle, Theo D'Hondt
Date : submitted to Aamas2002, 19 April 2002 & rejected.
File :  papers/Adaptors[_Aamas2002].ps.gz
File :  presentations/Glue[PRog24-05-02].sdd.gz
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Title : Het Gebruik van een Declaratieve Taal ter Ondersteuning van het Concurrentie-beheer van Mobiele Multi Agent Systemen
Auteur: Kristof Van Buggenhout
Date : Thesis '00 - '02
File :  thesis/KristofVanBuggenhout.ps.gz
Comment : De sukkelaar was duidelijk gefrustreerd bij het afgeven van zijn thesis. Zie eerste pagina :)
 
 

5. Quality Of Services

Title : Synchronization & Communication in Mobile Multi Agent Systems CSP Revisited
Auteur: Jannes Pockele
Date : '00 - '01
File :  thesis/JannesPockele.ps.gz
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Title : Quality Of Service
Auteur: Cederic Van Rykel
Date : Presented at Prog 26 Oktober 01
File :  presentations/QoS[Prog26-10-01].ppt.gz
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Title : Recovery of Partial Failure in Peer to Peer Computing
Auteur: Pieter Verheyden
Date : Presented at Prog 16 November 01
File :  presentations/QoS[Prog16-11-01].ppt.gz
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Title : Recovery of Partial Failure in Peer to Peer Computing
Auteur: Pieter Verheyden
Date : Presented at Prog 21 December 01
File :  presentations/QoS[Prog21-12-01].ppt.gz
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Title : Transparante Foutentolerantie voor Mobiele Multi-Agent-Systemen
Auteur: Pieter Verheyden
Date : '01 - '02
File :  thesis/PieterVerheyden.ps.gz
File :  presentations/QoS[Prog20-06-02].ppt.gz
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Title : Quality of Service voor Mobile Multi Agent Systemen
Auteur: Cedric Vanykel
Date : '01 - '02
File :  thesis/CedricVanrykel.ps.gz
File :  presentations/QoS[Prog20-06-02]2.ppt.gz