Building and implementing policies in autonomous and autonomic systems using MaCMAS

Autonomic Computing, self-management based on high level guidance from humans, is increasingly being accepted as a means forward in designing reliable systems that both hide complexity from the user and control IT management costs. Effectively, AC may be viewed as policy-based self-management. We look at ways of achieving this, with particular focus on agent-oriented software engineering. We propose utilizing MaCMAS, an AOSE methodology for specifying autonomic and autonomous properties of the system independently. Later, by means of composition of these specifications, guided by a policy specification, we construct a specification for the policy and its subsequent deployment. We illustrate this by means of a case study based on a NASA concept mission and describe future work on a support toolkit. This work has been partially supported by the European Commission (FEDER) and Spanish Government under CICYT project Web-Factories (TIN2006-00472) and grant TIC2003-02737-C02-01, by NASA Software Engineering Laboratory and NASA office of Safety and Mission Assurance Software Assurance Research Program (SARP), and at University of Ulster by the Computer Science Research Institute (CSRI) and the Centre for Software Process Technologies (CSPT), funded by Invest NI through the Centres of Excellence Programme, under the EU Peace II initiative.