Abstract
Policy based management is a powerful means for dealing with complex heterogeneous systems. However, the policies are commonly strictly interpreted, and it is tempting to resort to centralized decisions to resolve conflicts. At the same time, swarm intelligence based on “ant like” mobile agents has been shown to be able to deal with challenging optimization and trade-off problems. This paper discusses and demonstrates how policies may be used to govern the behavior of mobile agents to find near optimal solutions for the implementation of a set of potentially conflicting policies in a truly distributed manner. A more dependable/robust system is obtained. The enforcement of the policies is soft in the sense that it is probabilistic and yields a kind of “best effort” implementation. A case study illustrating how ant like mobile agents may implement load distribution and conflict free back-up policies, is presented.
The original version of this chapter was revised: The copyright line was incorrect. This has been corrected. The Erratum to this chapter is available at DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35620-4_43
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Wittner, O., Helvik, B.E. (2003). Robust Implementation of Policies Using Ant-Like Agents. In: Gaïti, D., Boukhatem, N. (eds) Network Control and Engineering for QoS, Security and Mobility. NetCon 2002. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing, vol 107. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35620-4_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35620-4_13
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