From intelligent agents towards management by request

In this article we introduce a management framework that allows the participation of major actors in the distributed computing environment (user applications and service providers) into network and systems management. This participation is realized by creating mechanisms that allow actors to express their requirements and capabilities to the management infrastructure. To make possible this interactive behavior between these actors and the management infrastructure, Intelligent Agents are proposed as management front-ends in charge to accept what we call management requests. This article also intends to present both the information model and the execution environment of this framework.