Emotional attributes in autonomic computing systems

In biological systems,autonomic behaviours are described through a language of emotions to communicate physical and psychological needs, and the motivations behind behaviour. For example the emotions of hunger and tiredness describe the current state of an organism and the motivation to manage resources for self-healing, the emotions of fear and disgust describe the motivation to allocate resources for self-protection. The parallels drawn from the emotional motivations for autonomic behaviour in biological systems and their application to the design of Autonomic Computing Systems are explored through EAMON (Emotional Attribute MONitor), an application which manages system components through the emotional attributes of Preference, Greed and Desire. This paper describes the principles behind EAMON and how an implementation can be used to demonstrate autonomic behaviour.