Our group, known as the D'Agents project, was funded by DARPA's Control of Agent-Based Systems (CoABS) project during the same period (1998-2004) as this NSF award. We used this funding, and the departmental infrastructure built with this NSF award, to delve ever more deeply into the fundamental challenges facing mobile-agent systems, including related topics in mobile ad hoc wireless networks, sensor networks, market-based control mechanisms for mobile agent systems, information retrieval (a common application domain for mobile agents), and middleware for sensor information processing.
We collaborated closely Professor George Cybenko and Research Engineer Bob Gray at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, research teams from Lockheed-Martin, the University of Western Florida, and Boeing, as well as non-CoABS researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Indeed, we led the Mobility TIE, a deep and productive collaboration that led to specifications for mobility support that became part of the CoABS Grid, and to two lines of research papers: one based on joint scalability experiments, and one based on joint development of an interoperability layer. The Mobility TIE also was involved in a Fleet Battle Experiment (obtaining experimental data that was incorporated into one of our papers [KCG+02]) and the CoAX coalition-forces demonstration.
The result was an extremely productive research team, producing numerous papers, training over two dozen students in Computer Science and in Computer Engineering, incorporating our research in undergraduate and graduate courses, demonstrating working prototypes to key players in government and industry, and laying the intellectual groundwork for several exciting new research efforts now underway.