4 A service-based approach for implementing intelligent agents

As mentioned in section 3, the Systems Management Facilities provide a means of integrating management functionality into the OMG framework. This section discusses different ways of building those facilities in order to extend CORBA by services suitable for systems management.

The service-based approach assumes that management functionality is not bound to the managing system but allows, if it is defined in terms of Management Services, being distributed and delegated: These services can then be used either by managing or by managed systems.

As already mentioned before, delegation of management functionality can happen at different stages in the agent's lifecycle: Functionality can either be assigned at compile time or during the runtime of the agent (Management by Delegation). While management functionality cannot be withdrawn from an agent during its lifetime using the former approach, this is feasible in the latter case.

Subsection 4.1 deals with definition aspects of management services; these aspects are independent of the mechanisms how implementations handle delegation (static or dynamic). Subsection 4.2 analyses how management functionality already defined in other management architectures can be accessed by CORBA-based management systems. The last subsection, 4.3, covers the case of dynamic delegation of functionality and presents an approach how to implement intelligent agents in CORBA.