Tools for Architecture Based Autonomic Systems

Recent years have seen a growing interest in autonomic computing, an approach to providing systems with self managing properties. Autonomic computing aims to address the increasing complexity of the administration of large systems. The contribution of this paper is to provide a generic tool to ease the development of autonomic managers. Using this tool, an administrator provides a set of alternative architectures and specifies conditions that are used by autonomic managers to update architectures at runtime. Software changes are computed as architectural differences in terms of component model artifacts (components, attributes, bindings, etc.). These differences are then used to migrate into the next architecture by reconfiguring only the required part of the running system.