THE ROLE OF INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE AGENTS IN INTEGRATED COMMUNICATIONS MANAGEMENT

With the rapid growth of telecommunications services and the networks that support these services, there is a need for integrated management processes. These processes manage not only the networks, but the services they provide and the customers they serve. Collectively these management processes are referred to as integrated communications management. These management processes will be either partially or fully automated and be undertaken by intelligent software agents (ISAs). However, since no single ISA could possibly possess all the knowledge necessary to achieve an integrated communications management solution, many ISAs will need to co-operate to meet the required performance. Research to define a framework for the multi-intelligent agent approach to integrated communications management is presented in this paper.