Authors:
Shin Osaki
1
;
Masayuki Higashino
2
;
Kenichi Takahashi
1
;
Takao Kawamura
1
and
Kazunori Sugahara
1
Affiliations:
1
Tottori University, Japan
;
2
Organization for Regional Industrial Academic Cooperation, Japan
Keyword(s):
Mobile Agent System, Debug, Distributed System, Migration, Interaction.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
Distributed Problem Solving
;
Mobile Agents
Abstract:
A mobile agent is an autonomous software module that can work on different computers and migrate among
these computers. The characteristics of a mobile agent, migration and interaction, are helpful to implement
distributed systems. In the real world, however, a mobile agent is not widely used because its migration makes
debugging distributed systems difficult. Therefore, in this paper, we discuss problems in debugging a mobile
agent system and propose a framework that includes a search, a single-step execution, and a reproduction
function to help programmers debug a mobile agent system. Results from our experiments on debugging test
applications show that our framework is helpful to support programmers and help them to debug. This reduces
the number of keystrokes by 41% and number of clicks by 24%.