The Farmer model with the component farming concept for developing TMN systems

Since the development of Telecommunication Management Network (TMN) by using different commercial platform tool kits, hardware platforms, and operating systems, there have been several problems with class management. One of the main problems is that all the agents of the TMN system must be duplicated and the software and the data blocks that perform identical function be maintained. Therefore, the standard of the Q3 interface development cannot be defined and the multi-platform cannot be supported in the development of the TMN agent. In order to overcome these problems, the Farming method that is based on the Farmer model has been suggested. The main concept of the Farming method is that the software and the data components that are duplicated and stored in each distributed object are saved in the Platform Independent Class Repository (PICR) by converting them into the format of the independent componentware in the platform, so that the componentwares that are essential for the execution can be loaded and used statically or dynamically from PICR as described in the framework of each distributed object. The distributed TMN agent of the personal communication network is designed and developed by using the Farmer model. The Farmer model is a frame structure model that is used for knowledge representation which introduces the concept of the system entity structure, and it is based on the Entity-Aspect (EA) model that is the knowledge representation model. The main objective of the Farmer model is to separate and extract the component elements that constitutes the agent by analyzing the agent which is actually planned to be designed. As a result of this, the component elements are located on the leaf node of the Farmer model tree, and these component elements are finally stored in PICR. In this paper, the design of TMN agent of Personal Communication Network (PCN) is described by using the Farmer model.