Section: Overall Objectives

Objectives of the team

telecommunications, self-management, distributed algorithms, fault management, distributed testing, web services, orchestrations, quality of service

The DistribCom team is jointly headed by Albert Benveniste (official head for Inria) and Claude Jard. It addresses models and algorithms for the distributed management of networks, services, Web services and business processes.

Today, research on network and service management as well as Web Services mainly focuses on issues of software architecture and infrastructure deployment. However, these areas also involve algorithmic problems such as fault diagnosis and alarm correlation, testing, QoS evaluation, negotiation, and monitoring. The DistribCom team develops the foundations supporting such algorithms. Our algorithms are model-based. Our research topics are therefore structured as follows:

1. Fundamentals of distributed observation and supervision of concurrent systems: this provides the foundations for deriving models and algorithms for the above mentioned tasks.

2. Self-modeling: for obvious reasons of complexity, our models cannot be built by hand. We thus address the new topic of self-modeling, i.e., the automatic construction of models, both structural and behavioral.

3. Algorithms for distributed management of telecommunications systems and services.

4. Web Services orchestrations, functional and QoS aspects.

5. Active XML peers for Web scale data and workflow management.

Our main industrial ties are with Alcatel-Lucent, and France-Telecom, on the topic of networks and service management.

Inria, Centre of Rennes-Bretagne-Atlantique, decided that Axel Legay and his group of post-docs and PhDs would remain hosted by DistribCom. The activities of Axel's group are specifically reported in Sections 3.4 , 6.5 , and 6.6 .