An active and intelligent network management system with ontology-based and multi-agent techniques

This paper presents a system to collect information through the cooperation of intelligent agent software, in addition to providing warnings after analysis to monitor and predict some possible error indications among controlled objects in the network. This technique derived from the ontology combining Ethereal and Cacti, which store the operating information of network management perfectly into the backend database. The system could sketch the four main components of network management systems with the technique of graphic monitoring multi-agent: an Interface Agent, a Proxy Agent, a Monitoring Agent, and a Search Agent. This architecture can effectively enhance and improve the network monitoring performance to be an active and intelligent network management system. It can present related quantification figures of dynamic information through graphic network monitoring system to provide fast, convenient, and profound network solutions to the users. The experimental outcomes proved that the techniques could not only precisely recognize error alarms but also indeed reduce the recovery time to 61% of traditional processing time for network troubleshooting. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.