Intelligent agents for networks management : a fault detection experiment

We present an architecture for flexible intelligent agents dedicated to build network management systems and its application for a concrete experiment. The agent architecture is based on Skills that can be plugged on 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 detail how this architecture was used to build a fault-tolerant agent system that distributedly monitors a multi-domain network. The fault tolerance was insured by a detection mechanism based on System Level Diagnosis, and a recovering procedure based on task redistribution. The experiment showed how the agent system could censure the distributed monitoring even in the case of the partial failure of the agent system.