Autonomic Systems – serie

The complexity of Information Technology (IT) systems has been steadily incre- ing in the past decades. In October 2001, IBM released the “Autonomic Computing Manifesto” observing that current applications have reached the size of millions of lines of code, while physical infrastructures include thousands of heterogeneous servers requiring skilled IT professionals to install, con?gure, tune, and maintain. System complexity has been recognized as the main obstacle to the further advan- ment of IT technology. The basic idea of Autonomic Computing is to develop IT systems that are able to manage themselves, as the human autonomic nervous system governs basic body functions such as heart rate or body temperature, thus freeing the conscious brain— IT administrators—from the burden of dealing with low-level vital functions. Autonomic Computing systems can be implemented by introducing autonomic controllers which continuously monitor, analyze, plan, and execute (the famous MAPE cycle) recon?guration actions on the system components. Monitoring acti- ties are deployed to measure the workload and performance metrics of each running component so as to identify system faults. The goal of the analysis activities is to determine the status of components from the monitoring data, and to forecast - ture conditions based on historical observations. Finally, plan and execute activities aim at deciding and actuating the next system con?guration, for example, deciding whether to accept or reject new requests, determining the best application to servers assignment, in order to the achieve the self-optimization goals.

Distributed applications are difficult to write as programmers need to adhere to specific distributed systems programming conventions and frameworks, which makes distributed systems development complex and error prone and ties the resultant application to the distributed system because the application's code is tangled with the crosscutting concern distribution.This book introduces the concept of a domain-specific aspect language called a Distribution Definition Language that generalises the distribution and distribution recovery concerns by describing the classes and methods of an existing application to be made remote, the distributed system to use to make them remote and the recovery mechanism to use in the event of an error. A software tool in the form of the RemoteJ compiler/generator that uses information contained in the Distribution Definition Language to generate the recovery and distributed system specific code and apply it to the application using bytecode manipulation and generation techniques is introduced.By allowing distribution and autonomic features, such as recovery, to be modularised and applied to existing applications this approach greatly simplifies distributed systems and autonomics development.This book is of particular interest to researchers and students of distributed systems, autonomics, domain-specific aspect languages and aspect-orientation.

Increasing size and complexity of software and hardware systems makes it harder to ensure their reliability. At the same time, the issues of autonomous computing become more critical as we more and more rely on software systems in our daily life. Such complexity is getting even more critical with the ubiquitous computing of embedded devices and other pervasive systems. These trends ask for techniques and tools for developing reliable and autonomous software which can support software engineers in their efforts. This book summarizes the state of the art of research in the diverse fields concerned, including novel designs, case studies and experimental as well as theoretical results.

Organic Computing has emerged as a challenging vision for future information processing systems. Its basis is the insight that we will increasingly be surrounded by and depend on large collections of autonomous systems, which are equipped with sensors and actuators, aware of their environment, communicating freely, and organising themselves in order to perform actions and services required by the users. These networks of intelligent systems surrounding us open fascinating ap-plication areas and at the same time bear the problem of their controllability. Hence, we have to construct such systems as robust, safe, flexible, and trustworthy as possible. In particular, a strong orientation towards human needs as opposed to a pure implementation of the tech-nologically possible seems absolutely central. The technical systems, which can achieve these goals will have to exhibit life-like or "organic" properties. "Organic Computing Systems" adapt dynamically to their current environmental conditions. In order to cope with unexpected or undesired events they are self-organising, self-configuring, self-optimising, self-healing, self-protecting, self-explaining, and context-aware, while offering complementary interfaces for higher-level directives with respect to the desired behaviour. First steps towards adaptive and self-organising computer systems are being undertaken. Adaptivity, reconfigurability, emergence of new properties, and self-organisation are hot top-ics in a variety of research groups worldwide. This book summarises the results of a 6-year priority research program (SPP) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) addressing these fundamental challenges in the design of Organic Computing systems. It presents and discusses the theoretical foundations of Organic Computing, basic methods and tools, learningtechniques used in this context, architectural patterns and many applications. The final outlook shows that in the mean-time Organic Computing ideas have spawned a variety of promising new projects.

The work on Autonomic Road Transport Support (ARTS) presented here aims at meeting the challenge of engineering autonomic behavior in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) by fusing research from the disciplines of traffic engineering and autonomic computing. Ideas and techniques from leading edge artificial intelligence research have been adapted for ITS over the last 30 years. Examples include adaptive control embedded in real time traffic control systems, heuristic algorithms (e.g. in SAT-NAV systems), image processing and computer vision (e.g. in automated surveillance interpretation). Autonomic computing which is inspired from the biological example of the body’s autonomic nervous system is a more recent development. It allows for a more efficient management of heterogeneous distributed computing systems. In the area of computing, autonomic systems are endowed with a number of properties that are generally referred to as self-X properties, including self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimization, self-protection and more generally self-management. Some isolated examples of autonomic properties such as self-adaptation have found their way into ITS technology and have already proved beneficial.   This edited volume provides a comprehensive introduction to Autonomic Road Transport Support (ARTS) and describes the development of ARTS systems. It starts out with the visions, opportunities and challenges, then presents the foundations of ARTS and the platforms and methods used and it closes with experiences from real-world applications and prototypes of emerging applications. This makes it suitable for researchers and practitioners in the fields of autonomic computing, traffic and transport management and engineering, AI, and software engineering. Graduate students will benefit from state-of-the-art description, the study of novel methods and the case studies provided.

This booktreats the computational use of social concepts as the focal point for therealisation of a novel class of socio-technical systems, comprising smartgrids, public display environments, and grid computing.Thesesystems are composed of technical and human constituents that interact witheach other in an open environment. Heterogeneity, large scale, and uncertaintyin the behaviour of the constituents and the environment are the rule ratherthan the exception.Ensuringthe trustworthiness of such systems allows their technical constituents tointeract with each other in a reliable, secure, and predictable way while theirhuman users are able to understand and control them. "TrustworthyOpen Self-Organising Systems" contains a wealth of knowledge, fromtrustworthy self-organisation mechanisms, to trust models, methods to measure auser's trust in a system, a discussion of social concepts beyond trust, andinsights into the impact open self-organising systems will have on society.

This book is a comprehensive introduction into Organic Computing (OC), presenting systematically the current state-of-the-art in OC. It starts with motivating examples of self-organising, self-adaptive and emergent systems, derives their common characteristics and explains the fundamental ideas for a formal characterisation of such systems. Special emphasis is given to a quantitative treatment of concepts like self-organisation, emergence, autonomy, robustness, and adaptivity. The book shows practical examples of architectures for OC systems and their applications in traffic control, grid computing, sensor networks, robotics, and smart camera systems. The extension of single OC systems into collective systems consisting of social agents based on concepts like trust and reputation is explained. OC makes heavy use of learning and optimisation technologies; a compact overview of these technologies and related approaches to self-organising systems is provided. So far, OC literature has been published with the researcher in mind. Although the existing books have tried to follow a didactical concept, they remain basically collections of scientific papers. A comprehensive and systematic account of the OC ideas, methods, and achievements in the form of a textbook which lends itself to the newcomer in this field has been missing so far. The targeted reader of this book is the master student in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering - or any other newcomer to the field of Organic Computing with some technical or Computer Science background. Readers can seek access to OC ideas from different perspectives: OC can be viewed (1) as a „philosophy“ of adaptive and self-organising - life-like - technical systems, (2) as an approach to a more quantitative and formal understanding of such systems, and finally (3) a construction method for the practitioner who wants to build such systems. In this book, we first try to convey to the reader a feeling of the special character of natural and technical self-organising and adaptive systems through a large number of illustrative examples. Then we discuss quantitative aspects of such forms of organisation, and finally we turn to methods of how to build such systems for practical applications.