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Modern trends in automation incorporate mobile agents for communication among distributed sites that are connected to each other through public or private networks. Mobile agents carrying communication for various sites and the agent platforms that provide the execution environment for mobile agents should be secured. An optimization framework to secure agent platforms and mobile agents in a distributed environment with low computation resources has been proposed. The optimization is achieved with respect to minimizing the security computation costs of agent platforms and reducing the turnaround time of mobile agents. This book outline Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) as a target application. Mobile agents are used in AMR to calculate power quality and to collect meter readings from energy meters. The cost for security computation with different approaches from the literature is shown in mathematical form and compared with the proposed approach. The results show that the proposed framework reduces the security computation costs at energy meters and decreases the turnaround time of mobile agents.

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Malik Najmus Saqib has completed MSE degree (Software Engineering) from COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan in 2003. He received doctorate degree from Institute of Computer Technology, Vienna University of Technology, Austria in 2009. He also worked as a researcher in University of California, Davis for six months.

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