StarMX: A Framework for Developing Self-Managing Software Systems

The scale of computing systems has extensively grown over the past few decades in order to satisfy emerging business requirements. As a result of this evolution, the complexity of these systems has increased significantly, which has led to many difficulties in managing and administering them. The solution to this problem is to build systems that are capable of managing themselves, given high-level objectives. This vision is also known as Autonomic Computing. A self-managing system is governed by a closed control loop, which is responsible for dynamically monitoring the underlying system, analyzing the observed situation, planning the recovering actions, and executing the plan to maintain the system equilibrium. The realization of such systems poses several developmental and operational challenges, including: developing their architecture, constructing the control loop, and creating services that enable dynamic adaptation behavior. Software frameworks are effective in addressing these challenges: they can simplify the development of such systems by reducing design and implementation efforts, and they provide runtime services for supporting self-managing behavior. This dissertation presents a novel software framework, called StarMX, for developing adaptive and self-managing Java-based systems. It is a generic configurable framework based on standards and well-established principles, and provides the required features and facilities for the development of such systems. It extensively supports Java Management Extensions (JMX) and is capable of integrating with different policy engines. This allows the developer to incorporate and use these techniques in the design of a control loop in a flexible manner. The control loop is created as a chain of entities, called processes, such that each process represents one or more functions of the loop (monitoring, analyzing, planning, and executing). A process is implemented by either a policy language or the Java language. At runtime, the framework invokes the chain of processes in the control loop, providing each one with the required set of objects for monitoring and effecting. An open source Java-based Voice over IP system, called CC2, is selected as the case study used in a set of experiments that aim to capture a solid understanding of the framework suitability for developing adaptive systems and to improve its feature set. The experiments are also used to evaluate the performance overhead incurred by the framework at runtime. The performance analysis results show the execution time spent in different components, including the framework itself, the policy engine, and the sensors/effectors. The results also reveal that the time spent in the framework is negligible, and it has no considerable impact on the system's overall performance

Flying the ST-5 Constellation with "Plug and Play" Autonomy Components and the GMSEC Bus

The Space Technology 5 (ST5) Project, part of NASA's New Millennium Program, will consist of a constellation of three micro-satellites. This viewgraph document presents the components that will allow it to operate in an autonomous mode. The ST-5 constellation will use the GSFC Mission Services Evolution Center (GMSEC) architecture to enable cost effective model based operations. The ST-5 mission will demonstrate several principles of self managing software components

Mitigating the Dark Side of Agile Teams: Peer Pressure, Leaders’ Control, and the Innovative Output of Self-managing Teams

Increasingly, organizations have been employing self-managing teams to circumvent bureaucratic controls and stimulate innovation. However, this goal is not easily achieved; in many situations, informal controls replace formal controls. This study develops a multi-level perspective of control. We explicitly analyze control mechanisms at different levels of the organization and how they affect innovative team output. We theorize and empirically investigate a potential downside of horizontal social control mechanisms at the team level (i.e., peer pressure) affecting self-managing teams’ innovative outcomes. We also discuss managerial control mechanisms at the organizational level (i.e., interactive and diagnostic management control systems) that may help to mitigate such negative effects. We theorize how they may influence the innovative output of self-managing teams, both directly and interactively. We chose a multi-level, multi-source setting for our study and ran three parallel surveys with employees in a Fortune 500 firm. 248 team members, 126 internal team leaders, and 97 organizational leaders enabled us to create a unique database of 97 self-managing software development teams. Our findings confirm that peer pressure is common among established agile teams and that it negatively influences the innovative output of the agile teams. Moreover, our findings show that the magnitude of the effect of peer pressure is contingent on control mechanisms at higher levels within the organization. This enables us to provide new theoretical insights regarding the paradoxical effect of managerial control systems when it comes to flat organizations and autonomous teams. Additionally, we provide practical guidelines for managers who increasingly adopt agile practices but at the same time face issues with regard to innovation

Separating Agent-Functioning and Inter-Agent Coordination by Activated Modules: The DECOMAS Architecture

The embedding of self-organizing inter-agent processes in distributed software applications enables the decentralized coordination system elements, solely based on concerted, localized interactions. The separation and encapsulation of the activities that are conceptually related to the coordination, is a crucial concern for systematic development practices in order to prepare the reuse and systematic integration of coordination processes in software systems. Here, we discuss a programming model that is based on the externalization of processes prescriptions and their embedding in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). One fundamental design concern for a corresponding execution middleware is the minimal-invasive augmentation of the activities that affect coordination. This design challenge is approached by the activation of agent modules. Modules are converted to software elements that reason about and modify their host agent. We discuss and formalize this extension within the context of a generic coordination architecture and exemplify the proposed programming model with the decentralized management of (web) service infrastructures

Autonomic Computing

Autonomic computing (AC) has as its vision the creation of self-managing systems to address today’s con-cerns of complexity and total cost of ownership while meeting tomorrow’s needs for pervasive and ubiquitous computation and communication. This paper reports on the latest auto-nomic systems research and technologies to influence the industry; it looks behind AC, summarising what it is, the current state-of-the-art research, related work and initiatives, highlights research and technology transfer issues and concludes with further and recommended reading