49 ReiMan : a G RM-based Relationship Manager Emmanuel Nata!, Olivier Festor, Laurent Andrey INRIA Lorraine Technopole de Nancy-Brabois- Campus scientifique. 615, rue du Jardin Botanique - B.P. 101 54600 Villers Les Nancy Cedex France. Tel: (+33} 83.59.20.48, Fax: (+33} 83.27.83.19 email: {nataf,festor,andrey@loria.fr} Abstract The modeling of physical and logical network resources provides the main inter- face to network management software applications. The object-oriented information model defined in the OSI managment framework provides notations to specify such interfaces. This framework has been recently extended with a relationship model. Relationship modeling adds informations upon isolated object specifications and offers new services for the management of these relationships. In this paper, we address some practical issues on network management architectures. To implement this new model, we start from relationship specifications up to the provision of a relationship service within the manager role of a managment system. Our study out- lines some lacks in the standardized relationship model and extends the notations with new statements to allow the development of a generic relationship provider. We also present a simple prototype that works on our Managed Object Develop- ment Environment. This prototype is a first implementation towards a complete tool for relationship management. Keywords Management, Applications, GRM, Information Model, 081, Relationships, TMN, Architecture. 1 INTRODUCTION The need for relationships in the design phase of Information Models has been recognized in various places and several proposals have been made in this direc- tion [Kilov 95, Clemm 93b]. Some proposals have been precursors for the General Relationship Model such as the work done by A. Clemm [Clemm 94, Clemm 93a]. Other ones have proposed their own notation such as S. Bapat in [Bapat 94]. A. A. Lazar et al. (eds.), Integrated Network Management V © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1997