@techreport{harker:thesis,
    author = {Kenneth Harker},
    title = {{TIAS}: A Transportable Intelligent Agent System},
    year = {1995},
    month = {June},
    number = {PCS-TR95-258},
    institution = {Dept. of Computer Science, Dartmouth College},
    copyright = {Kenneth Harker},
    group = {agents},
    note = {Senior Honors Thesis},
    url = {https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/senior_theses/171/},
    urlpdf = {ftp://ftp.cs.dartmouth.edu/TR/TR95-258.pdf},
    keyword = {transportable agents},
    abstract = {In recent years, there has been an explosive growth in the amount
of information available to our society. In particular, the amount of
information available on-line through vast networks like the global Internet
has been growing at a staggering rate. This growth rate has by far exceeded
the rate of growth in network speeds, as has the number of individuals and
organizations seeking access to this information. There is thus a motivation
to find abstract methods of manipulating this on-line data in ways that both
serve the needs of end users efficiently and use network resources
intelligently. In lieu of a traditional client-server model of information
processing, which is both inflexible and potentially very inefficient, a
Transportable Intelligent Agent system has the potential to achieve a more
efficient and flexible network system. An intelligent agent is a program that
models the information space for a user, and allows the user to specify how
the information is to be processed. A transportable agent can suspend its
execution, transport itself to a new location on a network, and resume
execution at the new location. This is a particularly attractive model for
both wireless and dialup networks where a user might not be able to maintain
a permanent network connection, as well as for situations where the amount of
information to be processed is large relative to the network bandwidth.
Preliminary work in the field has shown that such agent systems are possible
and deserve further study. This thesis describes a prototype transportable
intelligent agent system that extends work already done in the field. Agents
are written in a modified version of the Tcl programming language and
transported using TCP/IP connections. Several simple examples demonstrate the
properties of the system.},
}