Runtime Change of Collaboration Patterns in Autonomic Systems: Motivations and Perspectives

Today's distributed systems are more and more complex, so they are required to be autonomic, i.e., to exhibit some self-* properties in order to manage themselves. Autonomic systems are usually composed of different components, which collaborate to achieve a global goal or to provide a high-level service. The collaboration pattern is usually defined statically, but the aim of this paper is to show that there are motivations to enable composed systems to change their collaboration pattern at runtime in an autonomous way, starting from some case studies. This capability of autonomic systems is called self-expression, meaning that a system can express itself despite unexpected situations. Moreover, we propose three perspective solutions that aim at enabling the change at runtime: role-based, description based, and Artificial Immune Systems (AIS)-inspired.