Large-Scale Network and Service Management with WANTS

This chapter presents an overview of WANTS (Workflow and AgeNTS), an agent-based platform for large-scale network and service management that has been in daily use for broadband service provisioning and assurance for more than five years. The chapter first outlines the role of WANTS in the management of the broadband network of Telecom Italia and sketches its main features. Then, it briefly describes the major elements of the architecture of WANTS and maps them against the core features of WADE (Workflows and Agents Development Environment), the open-source platform for agent-based BPM (business process management) that WANTS uses. Finally, the chapter outlines a summary of the experience of using agent technologies in such a high-profile setting and emphasizes the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed solution.

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