A Multi-Agent System for Cooperative Network-Fault Management

The ever increasing complexity of network management demands tools to aid human operators to perform their tasks. Many expert systems have been developed to perform automatically fault correlation and diagnosis in telecommunications networks, but most of them are monolithic systems, oriented to a specific domain of application, and only a few are in accordance with present ISO standards for OSI network management. This paper presents a generic framework, the CNFM (Cooperative Network-Fault Manager), for developing network fault managers using a object-oriented multiagent architecture. The system is made up of largely autonomous and decentralised components, CNFM agents, cooperating together to carry out knowledge based fault management in networks. CNFM agents are dynamically created with only generic functional knowledge when faults appear. During operation every agent acquires from the network itself the structural and behavioral knowledge it needs on faulty elements. A high level interaction language is used by CNFM agents for cooperation tasks, but all communication with network element agents is made through primitives of a standard interaction protocol, allowing the integration of CNFM in management distributed platforms.