Intelligent agents and BIST/BISR - working together in distributed systems

This paper presents an attempt of using intelligent agents for testing and repairing a distributed system, whose elements may or may not have embedded BIST (built-in self-test) and BISR (built-in self-repair) facilities. The agents are software modules that perform monitoring, diagnosis and repair of the faults. Together they form a society whose members communicate, set goals and solve tasks. To demonstrate the idea we used the Zeus agent development environment. Two examples of distributed systems are presented in order to illustrate the cooperative model for fault diagnosis and repair.