Self-Managed Systems: an Architectural Challenge

Self-management is put forward as one of the means by which we could provide systems that are scalable, support dynamic composition and rigorous analysis, and are flexible and robust in the presence of change. In this paper, we focus on architectural approaches to self-management, not because the language-level or network-level approaches are uninteresting or less promising, but because we believe that the architectural level seems to provide the required level of abstraction and generality to deal with the challenges posed. A self-managed software architecture is one in which components automatically configure their interaction in a way that is compatible with an overall architectural specification and achieves the goals of the system. The objective is to minimise the degree of explicit management necessary for construction and subsequent evolution whilst preserving the architectural properties implied by its specification. This paper discusses some of the current promising work and presents an outline three-layer reference model as a context in which to articulate some of the main outstanding research challenges.