Development of Autonomic Management Solutions for the Military Application Domain

The Dutch Ministry of Defence is faced with ICT management problems, due to the increased use of complex ICT systems in the battle field. Solutions in the industry, such as remote assistance, cannot be applied in a domain with unreliable, low-bandwidth connections. In a case study performed at the Dutch Ministry of Defence, autonomic computing was used to reduce the effort by military personnel to manage the ICT systems that are available in their vehicles. Although autonomic computing has been around for some time, applying it in practice still offers challenges, especially in the development of the so-called utility-function policies. This paper describes the process of developing a solution for a military application using a generic framework and discusses the challenges that were faced during this process.