Dependent Partial Rollback for mobile agent systems

Abstract

In recent years, the mobile agent paradigm has drawn a lot of attention because of its attractive features, such as autonomy, mobility, flexibility, adaptability, efficiency, etc. Unfavorable outcomes may occur, however, if an agent only partially fulfills its tasks because of the limitations or restrictions of the environment. Transaction mechanisms can be used to prevent unfavorable outcomes. There are two fundamental building blocks, locking and rollback, that can be used in transaction mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a framework, called Dependent Partial Rollback, to apply the flexible transaction model and partial rollback to mobile agent systems. We analyse the performances of several transaction mechanisms in the mobile agent paradigm and show that the Dependent Partial Rollback should be the most efficient under certain conditions. Furthermore, we demonstrate the power of the Dependent Partial Rollback framework with a simple e-marketplace implementation.