Distributed Intelligent Agents for Control, Diagnosis and Repair

Wolfgang Nejdl and Martin Werner

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the use of distributed intelligent agents for building a system incorporating the tasks control, diagnosis and repair. We first discuss general problems associated with distributed systems and with distributed CDR-systems specifically. We then describe the general operations, which a CDR-system has to perform and the relations existing between the control-, diagnosis- and repair-component. We point out specific questions which arise when a CDR-system is implemented using a multi-agent-structure and the general tendencies in answering these questions. As there is no single best organization for all task environments, we examine two small example applications in the network domain and the corresponding CDR-systems. These examples show some of the variety of suitable architectures for CDR systems, unifying traits still have to be evaluated.