Article in Proceedings INPROC-2007-54

BibliographyMühl, Gero; Werner, Matthias; Jaeger, Michael A.; Herrmann, Klaus; Parzyjegla, Helge: On the Definitions of Self-Managing and Self-Organizing Systems.
In: KiVS 2007 Workshop: Selbstorganisierende, Adaptive, Kontextsensitive verteilte Systeme (SAKS 2007).
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology.
Informatik aktuell, english.
Bern, Switzerland: Springer-Verlag, March 2007.
Article in Proceedings (Conference Paper).
CR-SchemaC.2.4 (Distributed Systems)
F.1.1 (Models of Computation)
Keywordsself-organization, self-management, adaptivity, classification, formal model
Abstract

The management costs of software systems are becoming the dominating cost factor in running IT infrastructures. The main driving force behind this development is the ever-increasing system complexity which is becoming the limiting factor for further development. The fact that human administrators get more and more overstrained by management tasks has led to the idea of systems that manage themselves, i.e., self-managing systems. Another concept that is closely related to selfmanagement is self-organization. Self-organizing software systems often build on bio- and nature-inspired approaches. However, most publications on self-managing or self-organizing systems miss a clear definition of these terms. Even worse, although self-management and self-organization aim at similar goals, their relation still has not been defined properly. In this paper, we approach these problems by introducing a classification of systems that models self-organizing systems as a subclass of selfmanaging systems. The classification builds upon a definition of adaptive systems and introduces self-manageable, self-managing, and selforganizing systems. Our proposal serves as a starting point for further discussions, eventually leading to a better understanding of the terms self-organization and self-management and their interrelationship.

Full text and
other links
PDF (187630 Bytes)
Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Distributed Systems
Entry dateOctober 24, 2007
   Publ. Department   Publ. Institute   Publ. Computer Science