Towards the Automation of Autonomic Systems

Abstract

The managing of today’s computing systems goes beyond the administration of individual software environments. The need to integrate several heterogeneous environments into corporate-wide computing systems, and to extend that beyond company boundaries into the Internet, introduces new levels of complexity. Autonomic computing is considered as a promising solution to such problem. In this paper, we support the idea that agent architectural concepts are important to build such systems. We view autonomic elements as agents and autonomic systems as multi-agent systems. Although, there seems to be no commonly agreed properties that characterize an agent, there is a general consensus that autonomy is central to the notion of agency. In this paper, we propose a Petri nets with objects based formalism called cooperative objects for modeling autonomous agent systems. We mainly show how the proposed formalism favor autonomy property to a great extent.