A Methodology for Classifying Self-Organizing Software Systems.
Klaus Herrmann, Matthias Werner, Gero Mühl · 2006
Abstract: The software industry is faced with the fast growing complexity of IT infrastructures. This makes manual admin-istration increasingly difficult and appears to be the limiting factor in the general development of such infrastructures. This complexity crisis has stimulated many researchers to propose software systems that are allegedly self-organizing. However, often, this claim is only based on vague intuitions about self-organization, and a proper classification is missing. From a scientific standpoint, this is questionable and undesirable since it adds confusion rather than clarity. In this article, a frame-work is proposed that enables researchers to classify their sys-tems and to state clearly, verifiably, and reproducibly why and in which way they are self-organizing. This framework pro-vides a definition of the properties of a self-organizing system, it defines a respective class of systems denoted as SO, and it offers a methodology for proving that a given system is be-longing to SO or to its complement SO. Some case studies of well-known existing software systems are presented to show that the methodology is useful and practically applicable.