Using automated planning for trusted self-organising organic computing systems

Abstract

The increasing complexity of computer-based technical systems require new ways to control them. The initiatives Organic Computing and Autonomic Computing address exactly this issue. They demand future computer systems to adapt dynamically and autonomously to their environment. In this paper we propose a new approach based on automated planning to realise self-organising capabilities for complex distributed computing systems. The user/administrator only defines objectives describing the conditions which should hold in the system, whereas the system itself is responsible for meeting them using a planning engine. As many planning algorithms are known to be sound and complete, formal guarantees can be given. Thus we aim at building trusted self-organising distributed computer system which are suitable to control real technical systems. Our approach is demonstrated and evaluated on the basis of a simulated production cell with robots and carts. We propose and evaluate two optimisations. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.