Agent with Rule Engine: The "Glue' for Web Service Oriented Computing Applied to Network Management

Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is the fast emerging successor of the Object Oriented Computing design paradigm. Web Services technology, which is considered as an implementation of the SOC model, has had an incredible acceptance but tumultuous growth. This apparent chaos is due to its inherent lack of flexible cooperation strategies, generic service model and weak semantic description, mainly when deployed for Enterprise Applications with distributed computing transactions. Agent Based Web Services(AWS) is an appropriate approach to implement the Enterprise-Agent Design Model, which aims to overcome these inherent limitations of Web Services. In this paper, we report our ongoing efforts to use AWS in a Network Management System(NMS) we have built. Our NMS employs both SNMP and Mobile Agents(Aglets). We are developing an intelligent software agent, which is integrated with the Drools Rule Engine so that appropriate rules are triggered when pre-defined events occur. Our work is a novel approach covering a multitude of technologies such as SOC, AWS, Rule Engine, SNMP and Mobile Agents, with our Software Agent acting as a `glue' imbibing this synergy.