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There are increasing numbers of systems and research projects involving software agents and mobile agents. However, there is no reference model or conceptual framework to compare the resulting systems. In this paper, we propose a reference model to identify, classify and evaluate mobile agent systems having a significant set of non-trivial architectural issues and technical and functional features in order to support agent-based applications. Our proposed reference model describes a generic and global architecture and identifies a set of technical and functional features. The items analyzed include the following: execution, management of agent types, management of identifiers, persistence, navigation, communication, interaction with external resources, and security. We apply this reference model to analyze, compare, and discuss some well-known mobile agent systems: Telescript, Aglets, ffMain, D …