Towards a model-driven software engineering methodology for organic computing systems

The complexity of computing systems steadily increases and their future administration will soon exceed any human capabilities. A resort to this scenario are self-managing systems that administrate themselves according to high-level policies established by an administrator. Thus sys-tems configure, optimize, protect and heal themselves au-tonomously making administrative interferences unneces-sary. Organic Computing (OC) keeps this track by draw-ing analogies from biological systems such as ant colonies or dissipative structures, both resulting in emergent behav-ior. Due to its characteristics agent technology is partic-ularly suitable for an implementation of Organic Comput-ing Systems (OCS). However for a widespread industrial application acceptable software standards are required for both system architecture and software engineering. There-fore we propose a multi-agent system architecture and an appropriate development process as a first step towards a software engineering methodology for OCS. The process is based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) by the OMG and the UML 2 standard as well