General-purpose autonomic computing

The success of mainstream computing is largely due to the widespread availability of general-purpose architectures and of generic approaches that can be used to solve real-world problems cost-effectively and across a broad range of application domains. In this chapter, we propose that a similar generic framework is used to make the development of autonomic solutions cost effective, and to establish autonomic computing as a major approach to managing the complexity of today’s large-scale systems and systems of systems. To demonstrate the feasibility of general-purpose autonomic computing, we introduce a generic autonomic computing framework comprising a policy-based autonomic architecture and a novel four-step method for the effective development of self-managing systems. A prototype implementation of the reconfigurable policy engine at the core of our architecture is then used to develop autonomic solutions for case studies from several application domains. Looking into the future, we describe a methodology for the engineering of self-managing systems that extends and generalises our autonomic computing framework further

Programming, proving, and calculation

No abstract

Calculating and composing progress properties in terms of the leads-to relation

To facilitate the construction of concurrent programs based on progress requirements, we study an integration of the Owicki/Gries theory with UNITY’s leads-to relation. In particular we investigate a set of calculational rules for leads-to, and we study the composition of programs regarding their effect on progress. Apart from parallel composition, we consider the less familiar notion of weak sequential composition. Our techniques are illustrated on two network initialisation protocols that are related to the protocol standard IEEE 1394