Agent-oriented modeling approach for distributed network management applications

In recent years. software agent has gained great momentum in network management. and it is recognized as an effective technology to build distributed network management system. However. most researchers focus their attentions on the distributed management applications based on some specific agent architectures or platforms. Up to now. there is no a common methodology to guide the construction of the system of this paradigm. From the viewpoint of modeling, this paper adopts multiple models used in software agent and combines them together to form a novel systematical modeling approach. This modeling approach covers two stages in development: system analysis and system design. A prototype for managing network flows was also developed to testify, the modeling approach.