Process Oriented Programming for Agent Based Network Management

A multi-agent approach for network management was presented. Agents were built as a set of layers on top of the April language. April is a distributed symbolic programming language. The layers supported a set of object oriented and database features, labeled under the name April++. April++ objects have the ability in addition to the ordinary object oriented features, to deal with dynamic methods and relational database tables as part of their state component. These high level features facilitated the design of a generic agent architecture, where several heterogeneous components can be integrated using a blackboard as communication medium. This architecture, by adding appropriate agent components, was further specialised to build agents suitable for multi-service network management.