Abstract: The ever increasing complexity of network and system management has lead to some changes in the organisation of management: we have moved to a more distributed approach. This approach uses two or three management levels, mainly management agents (SNMP agents) and a management station, but we forecast that this distribution trend will continue, towards a fully distributed solution. We call this solution intelligent agent-based management. In this context, cooperation between individual management agents is essential for them to solve complex management problems. We focus our contribution on the architecture which allows this cooperation. Agents must exchange tasks and information (like any management agent), but also functionality. Messages may be of the type query/response or knowledge exchange and may be sent from one agent to another, to several others or to all. We have examined protocols that could suit communication between our intelligent agents, but none entirely fulfils our requirements. KeML (Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language) was chosen as our communication language and CORBA as our transport language. This combination, named COBALT, constitutes the base of our architecture for intelligent agent-based management.

Abstract: : The major areas of research described in this report include the contribution to the Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML) specification under the DARPA- sponsored Knowledge Sharing Initiative and the developing of a scaleable and an efficient implementation of information system components for ontological translation and effective cache-based implementations. This effort focused primarily upon developing Intelligent Agent Integration Technology and demonstrating it within distributed agent systems. This effort was a joint university/industry project in which technology development was supported by several university participants. The integration technology developed is based on KQML, a language and protocol intended to support interoperability among intelligent agents in a distributed application. The technical scope is the coordination of multiple "intelligent agents" which must communicate with one another. This report presents the basic accomplishments achieved which include: software systems and associated documentation for communication among multi-agent systems using the Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML); performance metrics and instrumentation for intelligent agent communication and Imowledge base access to databases which highlight performance issues, aspects and potential improvements for large-scale architectures; and study of ontological mediation issues and research.