LEAP: A FIPA Platform for Handheld and Mobile Devices

The ever-increasing importance of the market of portable devices is promoting the migration of technologies originally developed for the fixed network to the mobile network. This paper describes the general aim and the current results of a European-scale project intended to provide the enabling technology for deploying multi-agent systems across fixed and mobile networks. The LEAP project achieves its goal realising a FIPA platform that can be deployed seamlessly on any Java-enabled device with sufficient resources and with a wired or wireless connection. Such a platform is implemented as a new kernel for JADE to case the migration of legacy agents to the mobile network and it exploits a modular design to scale its functionality with the capabilities of the device.