Towards Self-Managed Systems Aware of Economic Value

Current self-managed systems do not take into account the economic value they exchange with external systems and services. While value-based software and requirements engineering approaches exist, they do not specifically deal with self-managed systems and their operations. These operations are typically associated with changing requirements, dynamic adaptations, and runtime reconfigurations, as well as changes in the environment. We argue that self-managed systems should be “aware” of their requirements and the economic value created (or loosed) by their fulfillment (or not fulfillment) as well as the economic value exchanged with other systems. They should be able to reason and take actions based on this “awareness”, especially when their environmental conditions are changing (both technical and economic ones). More generally, self-managed systems should be able to reason about the systems' business goals and relate them with the Quality of Service they offer. This paper discusses these issues and proposes a generic architecture for addressing them.