Intelligent Agents For Telecommunications Applications

Intelligent agent and distributed AI (DAI) approaches attach specific conditions to cooperative exchanges between intelligent systems, that go far beyond simple functional interoperability. Ideally, systems that pursue local or global goals, coordinate their actions, share knowledge, and resolve conflicts during their interactions within groups of similar or dissimilar agents can be viewed as cooperative coarse-grained systems. The infrastructure of telecommunications is a world in transition. There are a number of trends that contribute to this: convergence of traditional telephony and data network worlds, blurring of boundaries between public and private networks, complementary evolution of wireline, wireless, and cable network infrastructures, the emergence of integrated broadband multimedia networks and, of course, the information superhighway. Up to now, despite the effort that has gone into this area, the field of intelligent agents research has not yet led to many fielded systems. Telecommunications applications pose strong requirements to agents such as: reliability, real-time performance, openness, security management and other integrated management, and mobility. In order to fulfil their promise, intelligent agents need to be fully dependable and typically require an integrated set of capabilities. This is the challenge that exists for intelligent agents technology in this application domain.

The first international workshop on Intelligent Agents for Telecommunications Applications (IATA’96) was held in July 1996 in Budapest during the XII European Conference on Artificial Intelligence ECAI’96. The workshop program consisted of technical presentations addressing agent based solutions in areas such as network architecture, network management, and telematic services. Presentations gave rise to a lively debate on the advantages and difficulties of incorporating agent technology in telecommunications. The proceedings were published by IOS Press providing introductory papers on agent technology as well as telecom applications and services and also papers about appropriate languages and development tools. The second International Workshop, IATA’98, was held in Paris, in the framework of Agents’ World which brought together the principal scientific and technical events on agent technology such as the International Conference on Multi Agent Systems (ICMAS’98), RoboCup’98 devoted to an international competition between soccer playing robot teams, and six international workshops. Each workshop focused on specific aspects of agent technology such as databases and information discovery on the Internet (CIA’98), Collective Robotics (CRW’98), Simulation (MABS’98), Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages (ATAL’98), Communityware (ACW’98), and Telecommunications Applications (IATA’98). The proceedings of IATA’98 were published by Springer Verlag.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Intelligent Agents for Telecommunication Applications, IATA'98, held in Paris, France, in July 1998, in conjunction with the 1998 Agents World Conference. The book presents 17 revised full papers carefully selected for inclusion in the volume. The book is divided into topical sections on network architecture, network configuration and planning, network optimization, network management, agent-based architectures for service applications.

A software agent has a spectrum of definitions. At one end of the scale are relatively simple, client-based software applications that can assist users in performing mundane tasks such as sorting e-mail or downloading web pages. This class of agents is often referred to as “personal assistant” agents. At the other end of the scale is the concept of sophisticated software entities possessing artificial intelligence that autonomously travel through a network environment and make complex decisions on a user's behalf.In telecommunications, the definition lies somewhere between those two extremes. This classification of mobile agents, although not strictly adhering to the definition of “intelligent agents” originally proposed by the artificial intelligence community, is generally acknowledged to be a useful categorization and has started to gain widespread acceptance. We therefore define a mobile agent as a program that acts on behalf of a user or another program and is able to migrate from host to host on a network under its own control. The agent chooses when and where it will migrate and may interrupt its own execution and continue elsewhere on the network. The agent returns results and messages in an asynchronous fashion.This volume discusses the emerging field of mobile software agents and their applications to the area of telecommunications, such as active networks, e-commerce, the Internet, interactive QoS, network management, and feature interactions. It addresses the needs of a wide audience, including researchers, software agent systems and telecommunication applications designers, and users of software agents.

A software agent has a spectrum of definitions. At one end of the scale are relatively simple, client-based software applications that can assist users in performing mundane tasks such as sorting e-mail or downloading web pages. This class of agents is often referred to as "personal assistant" agents. At the other end of the scale is the concept of sophisticated software entities possessing artificial intelligence that autonomously travel through a network environment and make complex decisions on a user's behalf. In telecommunications, the definition lies somewhere between those two extremes. This classification of mobile agents although not strictly adhering to the definition of "intelligent agents" originally proposed by the artificial intelligence community, is generally acknowledged to he a useful categorization and has started to gain widespread acceptance. We therefore define a mobile agent as a program that acts on behalf of a user or another program and is able to migrate from host to host on a network under its own control The agent chooses when and where it will migrate and may interrupt its own execution and continue elsewhere on the network. The agent returns results and messages in an asynchronous fashion. This volume discusses the emerging field of mobile software agents and their applications to the area of telecommunications, such as active networks. e-commerce, the Internet, interactive QoS, network management, and feature interactions. It addresses the needs of a wide audience, including researchers, software agent systems and telecommunication applications designers, and users of software agents.

Mobile agents refer to self-contained and identi?able computer programs that can move within the network and can act on behalf of the user or another entity. Most of the current research work on the mobile agent paradigm has two general goals: reduction of network traf?c and asynchronous interaction. These two goals stem directly from the desire to reduce information overload and to ef?ciently use network resources. There are certainly many motivations for the use of a mobile agent paradigm; h- ever, intelligent information retrieval, network and mobility management, and network services are currently the three most cited application targets for a mobile agent system. The aim of the workshop is to provide a unique opportunity for researchers, software and application developers, and computer network technologists to discuss new dev- opments in the mobile agent technology and applications. After last year’s very successful workshop in Ottawa, Canada (110 attendees), this year’s workshop will focus on mobile agent issues across the areas of network m- agement, mobile applications, nomadic computing, e-commerce, ad-hoc networks and applications, feature interactions, Internet applications, QoS management, policybased management, interactive multimedia, and computer–telephony integration.