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SOAS'2007
International Conference on Self-Organization and
Autonomous Systems in Computing and Communications
(SOAS’2006)
Technical
Co-Sponsors:
Systems, Man, and
Cybernetics Society
International
Transactions on Systems Science and Applications
 Today’s
IT systems with its ever-growing communication
infrastructures and computing applications are becoming
more and more large in scale, which results in
exponential complexity in their engineering, operation,
and maintenance. Conventional paradigms for run-time
deployment, management, maintenance, and evolution are
particularly challenged in tackling these immense
complexities. Recently, it has widely been recognized
that self-organization and self-management/regulation
offer the most promising approach to addressing such
challenges. Consequently, a number of autonomic/adaptive
computing initiatives have been launched by major IT
companies, like IBM, HP, and others.
Self-organization
and adaptation are concepts stemming from the nature and
have been adopted in systems theory. They are considered
to be the essential ingredients of any living organism
and, as such, are studied intensively in biology,
sociology, and organizational theory. They have also
penetrated into control theory, cybernetics and the
study of adaptive complex systems. The original idea was
to understand complex systems behaviour by understanding
the systems’ self-organization and adaptation mechanisms,
i.e., to understand a system by observing the behaviour
of its components and their interactions. However, as
stated, the study of self-organization and adaptation
has mainly been related to living systems so far.
Computing and communication systems are basically
artificial systems. This prevents conventional
self-organization and adaptation principles and
approaches from being directly applicable to computing
and communication systems. Complexity attributes in
terms of openness, scalability, uncertainty,
discrete-event dynamics, etc. have varied contexts in
large-scale complex IT systems, and are too prominent to
be solved by the procedures pre-defined at design-time.
Rather, they have to be tackled by means of run-time
perception of the complexity patterns and the run-time
enforcement of self-organization and adaptation policies.
The current knowledge about large-scale complex IT
systems is still very limited, and a framework has yet
to be established for their self-organization and
adaptation.
The methodology of multi-agent systems and the
technology of Grid computing have shed lights for the
exploration into the self-organization and adaptation of
large-scale complex IT systems. Essentially, multi-agent
systems provide a generic model for large-scale complex
IT systems. Exploring and understanding the
self-organization and adaptation of multi-agent systems
is of profound significance for engineering the
self-organization and self-management/regulation of
large-scale complex IT systems comprised of
communication infrastructures and computing applications.
A Grid computing system exposes all the complexity
attributes typical of large-scale complex IT systems.
Investigating the self-organization and autonomic
systems for Grid computing has remained a huge challenge.
To respond to the challenge above, apparently there
is the urgency to have a focal forum to exchange and
disseminate the state-of-the art developments from
different disciplines.
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