Smart Doorplates - toward an autonomic computing

The last three decades proved Moore´s Law. We witnessed an exponential increase in processing power, memory capacity and communication bandwidth and we expect this increase to continue for at least another decade. The effect is a growing complexity of computer systems and the need for highly qualified administrators. The question must be posed how computer systems can be managed in future if we project the actual progression in systems intricacy. This paper focuses on autonomic computing as a potential solution. We describe how a distributed system can be built to satisfy the demands for self-configuration, self-healing, context awareness and anticipation. Furthermore we describe our application example - Smart Doorplates - and the appliance of the previously discussed demands to that system.