In the paper the suitability of CORBA for implementing intelligent agents has been analyzed. Together with its associated CORBAservices and CORBAfacilities, CORBA provides a good enabling technology for integrated distributed systems management but currently lacks of services providing powerful systems management functionality. It is therefore necessary to introduce this functionality in a way that it can be shared between managing and managed systems.
The approach described in this paper relies on defining management functionality in terms of management services; the set of all the services yields a middleware for systems management purposes. In CORBA-environments, this middleware is implemented in terms of distributed objects which can be accessed in a location-transparent fashion. It is even possible to reuse non-CORBA-conforming management functionality being part of already existing management architectures.
Issues of major importance for further research include:
The recent emerging of services allowing to distribute copies of objects across an ORB provides the enabling technology for CORBA-based intelligent agents. As implementations of these services (and sometimes even CORBA 2.0-compliant interoperability) are at the moment not contained in ORB development toolkits, the concepts remain currently rather theoretic. This situation may change in the near future: All major manufacturers have announced to make their ORB implementations fully conform to the OMG framework.