Information modeling of applications using mobile management agents with extensible behavior in run-time

Abstract

Software agent technology is a new and an emerging technology. It is an active research area today. Generally, a software agent is defined as an autonomous software entity that can interact with its environment. Mobile agents represent a special class of agents capable of transporting itself from one environment or platform to another. Agents of this type can be successfully used to assist in complex telecommunications network and system management tasks such as: operation monitoring, load balancing, rebooting, failure anticipation, problem analysis, etc. Moreover, mobile agents allow one to decrease the pressure on centralized network management systems by delegation of specific management activities from the central operations system to spatially dispersed management agents. The expected benefits represent a motive to better develop applications using agent modeling and is one of the most important phase in such a development. It is concerned with the identification and location of information in the systems and the description of information processing activities, but completely independent of the system implementation. We explain our approach to information modeling of management applications using mobile agents. The approach is based on the usage of two modeling languages: Unified Modeling Language (UML) with adequate extensions as well as the Object Constraint Language (OCL).