COBALT: an architecture for intelligent agent-based management

The ever increasing complexity of network and system management has lead to some changes in the organisation of management: we have moved to a more distributed approach. This approach uses two or three management levels, mainly management agents (SNMP agents) and a management station, but we forecast that this distribution trend will continue, towards a fully distributed solution. We call this solution intelligent agent-based management. In this context, cooperation between individual management agents is essential for them to solve complex management problems. We focus our contribution on the architecture which allows this cooperation. Agents must exchange tasks and information (like any management agent), but also functionality. Messages may be of the type query/response or knowledge exchange and may be sent from one agent to another, to several others or to all. We have examined protocols that could suit communication between our intelligent agents, but none entirely fulfils our requirements. KeML (Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language) was chosen as our communication language and CORBA as our transport language. This combination, named COBALT, constitutes the base of our architecture for intelligent agent-based management.