language: en

Agent Tcl: Alpha Release 1.1

Robert S. Gray
Department of Computer Science Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
E-mail: robert.s.gray@dartmouth.edu December 1, 1995

Abstract Agent Tcl is a transportable agent system. The agents are written in an extended version of the Tool Command Lanuage (Tcl). Each agent can suspend its execution at an arbitrary point, transport to another machine and resume execution on the new machine. This migration is accomplished with the agent jump command. agent jump captures the current state of the Tcl script and transfers this state to the destination machine. The state is restored on the new machine and the Tcl script continues its execution from the command immediately after the agent jump. In addition to migration, agents can send messages to each other and can establish direct connections. A direct connection is more efficient than message passing for bulk data transfer. Finally, agents can use the Tk toolkit to create graphical user interfaces on their current machine. Agent Tcl is implemented as two components. The first component is an extended Tcl interpreter. The second component is a server which runs on each machine. The server accepts incoming agents, messages and connection requests and keeps track of the agents that are running on its machine. An alpha release of Agent Tcl is available for public use. This documentation describes how to obtain and compile the source code, how to run the server and how to write transportable agents.

[Supported by AFOSR contract F49620-93-1-0266 and ONR contract N00014-95-1-1204]