3.3.1 Defining Input and Output

A management application serves three purposes: to access resources in order to give or receive information, to perform some operation on this information, and to expose the result to others. The operation that a manager performs on its information might be some form of computation, a concentration of the data, or simply a translation from one representation to another.

For example, a manager for a network might collect bandwidth data from routers and calculate averages that are available through some API. The manager also monitors all data for abnormal values and triggers a notification when they occur. These could arguably be the tasks of a smart agent, but let us suppose it is an intermediate manger for very simple agents in the routers.

Now consider a second example: a graphical user interface for managing a pool of printers. Agents in the printers signal whenever there is an error, the manager reads other parameters to determine whether the problem is serious and displays a color-coded icon of the printer: red if the printer needs servicing, orange if it is only a paper problem, and green if the printer is now back online.

In both cases, the applications can have much more functionality, but each function can be broken down into its three facets. By identifying what data needs to be collected, how it needs to be processed and how it needs to be exposed, you can determine the agents that need to be accessed, the algorithms that need to be implemented, and the format of the output.