Autonomous and Autonomic Systems: Paradigm for Engineering Effective Software-Based Systems?

The Autonomous and Autonomic Systems initiative has as its vision the creation of self-directed and self-managing systems to address today's concerns of complexity and total cost of ownership while meeting tomorrow's needs for pervasive and ubiquitous software-based computation and communication. The future of computing and communications is being researched under many areas, including cloud, grid, utility, pervasive, ubiquitous, invisible, world, ambient, paint and so forth. The driving force behind these future paradigms of computer-based systems is the increasing convergence between proliferation of devices, wireless networking, and mobile software. Weiser first described what has become known as ubiquitous computing as the move away from the “dramatic” machine, where hardware and software's focus was on being so exciting that we as users would not want to be without it, towards making the machine “invisible”, so embedded in our lives it is used without thinking or recognising it as computing. Behind these different terms and research areas, lie three key properties: nomadic, embedded and invisible. In effect, leading to, the creation of a single system with (potentially) billions of networked information devices and resulting in a Complexity Quagmire? As such, the case can be made that all of the next generation paradigms, in one form or another, will require an autonomic-self-managing-infrastructure to be able to provide the successful reality of this envisaged level of pervasiveness, invisibility and mobility. This keynote talk reports on research and development, with examples from Biometric Identification and Tracking Systems, Autonomic Communications, and Space Exploration Systems, utilizing the biological metaphor of the autonomic nervous system to computing and communications, in which computer-based systems self-regulate by using automatic reactions to defend, optimize and heal.