Intelligent agents for network management: a fault detection experiment

We present an architecture for flexible intelligent agents dedicated to building network management systems and their application for a concrete experiment. The agent architecture is based on skills that can be plugged into an agent brain. The skill is a piece of code that can be loaded seamlessly into an agent to supply it with more new capabilities. The brain is a common part that governs the whole function of the agent. We will explain in detail how this architecture was used to build a fault-tolerant agent system that distributedly monitors a multi-domain network. The fault tolerance was ensured by a detection mechanism based on system level diagnosis, and a recovery procedure based on task redistribution. The experiment demonstrated how the agent system could ensure the distributed monitoring even in the case of the partial failure of the agent system.