A multi‐agent self‐adaptative management framework

The self‐management vision, which has raised much interest in recent years, is only an operational aim that does not provide any solution in its definition on how to attain this management autonomy. The general contribution of this article suggests concepts, methods and mechanisms to conceive a self‐adaptative management framework, thus participating in this self‐management vision. This framework is composed of organizational aspects based on multi‐agent concepts, informational aspects based on different management ontologies and cooperative aspects based on specific agent behaviours which automate the accomplishment of management actions on the overall distributed environment. We have also implemented a prototype of this work to validate the feasibility of our approach and confirm the self‐adaptation capacities of the system. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.