Current standardization efforts in the agent community are lead by FIPA and the OMG.
The priority of FIPA standards is to provide an agent platform that allows for heteroge-neous agents to communicate based on common agent services and the standard com-munication language ACL (Agent Comcom-munication Language). Recently, FIPA efforts are being empowered with ongoing efforts to provide reusable agent interaction patterns described using scenario diagrams. Interaction patterns will be very useful to easily and flexibly incorporate coordination mechanisms within agent-based systems. A valu-able effort for the application of software agents in NM would be to provide a library of such interaction patterns that can be directly used in complex management applications.
These interaction patterns could be classified according to the type of management func-tion to be implemented.
Furthermore, there are emerging efforts to extend UML (Unified Model-ing Language, http://www.rational.com/uml) for agents [OPB99, OPB00, (see http://www.jamesodell.com)]. These standard UML extensions will further encourage
agent developers to provide general reusable patterns to describe both agent internal processing, and inter-agent communications. References about this subject are still scarce, but are expected to emerge in the near future.
A pattern-based approach to apply agents in NM has a great potential to encourage agent-based management systems. Interaction patterns are certainly of a great use in this context. Even more important are systematic mechanisms that allow agent software to be highly autonomous, responsive, proactive and self-adaptable. Therefore, we be-lieve that agent patterns that describe internal agent architectures as well as behavioural patterns such as autonomy and proactiveness patterns targeted to NM would be the killer argument for the deployment of a real software agent technology.
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