With increasing requirements of distributed software systems, software agents are becoming a mainstream technology for software engineering and data management. Scalability and adaptability are two key challenges that must be addressed. In this work a new model is introduced for building large-scale distributed software systems with high dynamics, using a hierarchy of homogeneous agents that has the capability of service discovery. The performance of the agent system can be improved using

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... ent combinations of optimisation strategies. A modelling and simulation environment has been developed to aid the performance evaluation process. Two case studies are given and simulation results are included that show the impact of the agent mobility and the choice of performance optimisation strategies on the overall system performance.