Specifying the dynamic behavior of management systems

Decision making in any complex system is a very difficult task. In Man, decisions are reached as a result of trying to satisfy both conscious and unconscious goals. To emulate this in a computer system we need to find a way of representing goals and modeling the decision making process. This paper describes a model for decision making in the context of the management of distributed computer systems, and discusses the implications for the representation of goals and other information used during the decision making process. The work described in this paper was performed in the ESPRIT II project DOMAINS. This project is concerned with developing an architecture for the integrated management of all resources in a networked system. The emphasis of this paper lies in modeling rather than implementation.