Knowledge Management for a LAN design and operations using multi-agent systems

The department of Computer Science, at Chiba Institute of Technology has been using LANs since 1988. Its own LAN, CS-LAN, is steadily expanding, becoming very complex and reaching now a spaghetti state. Next April 2011, the department of Computer Science will move to another building on the same campus. We need to design a new LAN to be installed in the future building. It will be provided by new vendors, use new technologies complying with the constraints of the new building. However, our department has no full time network manager, one of our colleague professors working as a network manager on his spare time. Therefore, all the knowledge about the CS-LAN is scattered among users, mainly professors and is not recorded. Indeed, the changes in configuration of the CS-LAN were often reported by e-mail only. In this paper, we try to propose a design plan working with multi agent systems in order to compare the design parts of the new CS-LAN, and capture design and operational knowledge semi-automatically for future use.