Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 7, numbers 1 and 2, 2014 // View article

'Trustworthy Autonomic Architecture (TAArch): Implementation and Empirical Investigation

Authors:
Thaddeus Eze
Richard Anthony

Keywords: trustworthy architecture; trustability; validation; datacentre; autonomic system; dependability; stability; autonomic architecture

Abstract:
This paper presents a new architecture for trustworthy autonomic systems. This trustworthy autonomic architecture is different from the traditional autonomic computing architecture and includes mechanisms and instrumentation to explicitly support run-time self-validation and trustworthiness. The state of practice does not lend itself robustly enough to support trustworthiness and system dependability. For example, despite validating system’s decisions within a logical boundary set for the system, there’s the possibility of overall erratic behaviour or inconsistency in the system emerging for example, at a different logical level or on a different time scale. So a more thorough and holistic approach, with a higher level of check, is required to convincingly address the dependability and trustworthy concerns. Validation alone does not always guarantee trustworthiness as each individual decision could be correct (validated) but overall system may not be consistent and thus not dependable. A robust approach requires that validation and trustworthiness are designed in and integral at the architectural level, and not treated as add-ons as they cannot be reliably retro-fitted to systems. This paper analyses the current state of practice in autonomic architecture, presents a different architectural approach for trustworthy autonomic systems, and uses a datacentre scenario as the basis for empirical analysis of behaviour and performance. Results show that the proposed trustworthy autonomic architecture has significant performance improvement over existing architectures and can be relied upon to operate (or manage) almost all level of datacentre scale and complexity.

Pages: 279 to 301

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2014. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2014

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679