Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 5, numbers 3 and 4, 2012 // View article

An Interoperability Service for Autonomic Systems

Authors:
Richard Anthony
Mariusz Pelc
Haffiz Shuaib

Keywords: Autonomic systems; Interoperability; Services

Abstract:
Interoperability support is a key outstanding requirement for autonomic computing systems, and this need stems from the very success of these systems. Autonomic computing is increasingly popular; soon autonomic control components will be commonplace and present in almost every large or complex application. Interoperability between autonomic managers is an increasingly urgent concern, as the proliferation of autonomic systems inevitably leads to situations where multiple autonomic components coexist and interact either directly or indirectly within the same application or system. Problems can arise when numerous independently designed autonomic components interact, potentially destabilising systems. We advocate a service-based approach to interoperability and present a set of requirements for such an approach as well as a suitable architecture. A key component of this architecture is the Interoperability Service with which Autonomic Managers register their management interests and capabilities, using a management description language. The Interoperability Service automatically discovers and manages potential conflicts between manager components. Developers integrate Autonomic Managers with the Interoperability Service by importing its interfaces. This allows the Interoperability Service to automatically suspend and resume managers, or specific management functions as necessary, driven by the automated conflict detection. We illustrate the use of the Interoperability Service in a data-centre scenario in which independently developed power management and performance management autonomic components operate.

Pages: 341 to 356

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2012. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2012

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679