Cooperative management in open distributed systems

Abstract

We describe the need for the collaboration of managers in cooperative applications where the federative application context must be harmonized with the hierarchical component environment. A cooperative management concept is introduced which augments existing hierarchical management policies and procedures. The concept includes proposals for federations, ‘manager’ domains and collaboration procedures. It relates a group of managers to a group of managed objects, and proposes rules for collaboration between the managers before executing operations on the objects. Some possible application areas, including inter-domain information management, customer network management, the management of virtual private networks (VPN) and trading in open distributed processing (ODP), are discussed. A related approach is described for comparison. Remarks on the importance of adequate access control mechanisms and on the need for the dynamic creation and modification of manager groups are added.