Abstract
Competition has raised the need for network management to also include companies' service and business process management. The purpose is to rate the quality level of the services, maximising it, and if possible assuring it.
To address these issues, this thesis proposes a management model based on an active policy hierarchy, with several abstraction levels, to manage the network and the associated systems, rate the offered quality of service, and as far as possible assure the expected quality requirements. Active policies are active objects that act over the network, automating management tasks, dealing with monitoring, control and planning, in order to reach the proposed management objectives.
This thesis also proposes a methodology to analyse the quality of service requirements, and to build the necessary active policies based on a pre-defined set of acting rules that dynamically adjust managed object parameters.
Two scenarios were simulated to show how the proposed methodology and management architecture should be applied. Thus, it was shown how the proposed model can be applied to analyse management problems, and how active policies can be used to enforce service level agreements between service providers and users.
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