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This paper is the first exploratory and quantitative study on a global scale of the current and future impact of ISO 20000, a standard that is forecast to play an important role in the information technology service management field. For the analysis of the current situation, this article first describes this standard and other related standards. This is followed by a diffusion analysis using worldwide certification data. It also analyses geographical distribution by continents and countries and examines its evolution over time through comparison with other management-system standards. The analysis extends to the relationships existing between countries, and a clear correlation is detected between different countries regarding the number of certifications and certification intensity. Regarding future forecasts, a logistic curve is used to detect the theoretical saturation point, which is earlier than previously thought. Therefore, and comparing it with an updated forecast for other parallel standards (viz: ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 27001), the analysis presents a new scenario.

Purpose - This paper explores the benefits perceived by organisations with certified ISO 20000 service management systems. It intends to propose a classification of benefits and test the relationship between that classification and general satisfaction of the standard. Design/methodology/approach - The study is based on 105 responses to a survey on ISO-20000- certified organisations in Spain. After a descriptive analysis of the sample, a structural equation model is presented to test the hypothesis presented. Findings—According to the model, ISO 20000 benefits can be divided between internal and external benefits. The variables that best define each type of benefit are identified. Moreover, those factors are proven to be related to general satisfaction with ISO 20000 certification and the existing correlation between internal and external benefits. Originality/value—In light of the fact that there are few quantitative studies in the field of IT service management, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the benefits related to its application. Conversely, this paper shows how to apply the classification of internal and external benefits in the case of ISO 20000 and proposes a model of causality between those benefits and satisfaction.

This paper explores the benefits organizations perceive that they have attained by their ISO 20000 service management system standard certification. The paper proposes a classification of benefits and tests the relationship between that classification and general satisfaction with the standard. The study is based on 105 responses to ISO-20000-certified organisations survey in Spain. After a descriptive analysis of the sample, a structural equation model is designed to test the hypotheses presented. According to the model, ISO 20000 benefits can be divided into those which are internal and those which are external. The variables that best define each type are identified. Moreover, those benefits are shown to be related to general satisfaction with ISO 20000 certification. The findings can be extended to other IT service management standards such as ITIL.

This paper presents the difficulty in routing and managing protected paths in inter-domain fault-protection. This is caused by the lack of trust be- tween such domains. A multi-agent system is proposed for managing this spe- cific problem. This approach takes advantage of intrinsic distributed agents' benefits and explodes the high level communication capacities through the definition of a common ontology that can solve the limitations imposed by the reluctance between the involved domains.

En el presente artículo se describe la arquitectura de un sistema integral de gestión del ancho de banda y protección para entornos de redes MPLS. El sistema está formado por dos módulos, el de encaminamiento y el de gestión de recursos. El módulo de encaminamiento escogerá la mejor ruta de trabajo y las posibles rutas de respaldo, teniendo en cuenta los requerimientos de calidad de servicio y de protección de la petición. El módulo de gestión de recursos se encargará de la gestión de fallos en la red y de la mejora de la utilización de los recursos de la red mediante mecanismos de reasignación dinámica del ancho de banda.

Network resource management deals with proto- cols and networks capable of performing a reser- vation of the available resources in order to guar- antee a certain Quality of Service (QoS). These reserved resources can be seen as a Virtual Network, which introduces flexibility and can be dynamically reconfigured. Examples of technolo- gies that can utilise this Virtual Network concept are Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Multi- Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), and Generalised MPLS (GMPLS), which are usually used in core networks. An important objective of network providers is to obtain the maximum profit from their resources, hence there is a need for an efficient resource management. This paper presents a distributed architecture for dynamic resource management using the Virtual Network concept, in a connection-oriented environment. The objective is also to automate sev- eral human network manager functions in order to obtain a better network performance. The proposed architecture ...

This document starts with a brief background of MPLS networks, network management and agent systems. After that, the state-of-the-art in agent based network management is presented by reviewing several systems following various categories, like multi-agent systems and mobile agents systems

In this paper it is introduced an architecture of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) devoted to Network Resource Management. This MAS performs a distributed and dynamic management of the logical network and not a single agent has a global network view. Despite the lack of global network view, results show that the MAS manages the network resources effectively, reducing the connection blocking probability and, therefore, achieving better utilisation of the network resources. The paper focuses on the analysis of the communication and co-ordination mechanisms between the agents.

In this paper, we introduce a completely new network simulator for the simulation of connection-oriented networks at a call level. The simulator is conceived as a framework for the development of external agents to control the network. It is built upon - and takes advantage of the features of - the standard agent platform JADE, enabling the integration of third-party agent development. The simulator and its components are described along with a running test which was carried out to show its functionality.