Abstract

An agent organization system for multi-agent based network management, called ARTISTE, is proposed. For a multi-agent system to solve problems effectively, it is important to organize agents appropriately. Organizing agents adaptively on the Internet, however, is not easy, because the status of the Internet changes dynamically in a short time and no one can have a complete view of the whole network. The aims of ARTISTE are to form an agent organization in accordance with the current Internet and its problem-solving context and to provide organizational information for target MASs. ARTISTE operates as an independent system with respect to any MAS. To organize agents, ARTISTE collects information about agents' abilities and statuses, network information such as topologies, and a problem-dependent requirement from a target MAS. ARTISTE is designed as an MAS, and it can collect the information about the network and the target MAS from multiple observation points. Furthermore, ARTISTE agents exchange their own local information in order to create a more global view of the network and the distribution of the agents. Our performance evaluation showed that ARTISTE works with sufficient performance for use in the actual Internet environment.