Distributed cooperative agents for service management in communications networks

This paper concentrates on issues of resilience and fault tolerance of cooperative intelligent agents (complex software systems), introducing some basic concepts of global multiservice networks, and identifying service provision and restoration as problem areas. The distributed nature of the network of agents gives scope for reducing the total amount of data passed to a central point, and so improving performance. The agent community is self-organising and continues to function with reduced performance after failure of one or more agents. Other advantages are concurrent execution and dynamic use of local knowledge