SOGOS - A Distributed Meta Level Architecture for the Self-Organizing Grid of Services

Handling highly dynamic scenarios as they arise in emergency situations requires lots of semantic information about the situation and an extremely flexible, selforganizing IT infrastructure that provides services that can be used to manage the situation. We show that a distributed meta level architecture is particularly suited for the implementation of such a self-organizing grid of services. This architecture (SOGOS) distinguishes between an object level and a meta level. The middleware processes of the grid are running on the object level. The meta level defines an explicitly and declaratively represented dynamic meta model that provides the semantics for the object level processes. Additionally, this level runs processes that plan, supervise and control mobile agents on the object level. The levels are linked together by reflection processes that ensure that relevant changes on the object level are reflected in the meta model and vice versa. The corresponding reflection principles provide the basis for the implementation of the selforganizing mechanisms that govern the overall system.