Communication Requirements and Technologies for Multi-Agent Management Systems

These days, management solutions are moving to decentralised, flexible approaches based on cooperative intelligent agents. This raises new needs for communication between management entities, as it implies not only exchange of pure management information -where protocols such as SNMP excelbut also exchange of co-operation messages or code. The purpose of this paper is firstly to identify the communication requirements arising in such a management system and specify the corresponding communication services. Existing communication protocols from the areas of network management, distributed systems and intelligent agents are examined in terms of their suitability for realising the distributed management communication services. We think that there is presently no communication protocol that embraces all of the specific needs of fully-distributed management, but we can underline some of the existing ones as being good candidates. The outcome of this investigation for specific protocols is validated by the results obtained from a prototypical implementation.