Management Relationships in Self-managed Service Compositions
Justin King · 2009
Self-managed systems have been identified as a key approach to addressing the problem of ever increasing software complexity. Systems with self-management capabilities decrease the burden on human operators, as issues such as problem diagnosis, configuration and responses to changing non functional requirements are taken on as an internal responsibility. Building self-managed service compositions is one way of embedding a system with self-management capabilities. These systems take existing web services and other components with no self-management capability and introduce an autonomous entity responsible for monitoring the environment and adapting the service configuration to keep operation optimal. Systems that possess this level of autonomy are often functionally decomposed into organisational hierarchies. These hierarchies are strict command-control structures, yet as systems become more open and exist across domains there is a need to allow control relationships to exist independently of structure and for more flexible structures to be possible. This will allow more effective use of the increasing intelligent capabilities of autonomous systems. Management patterns in human organisations allow these flexible