Complex autonomic systems for networked enterprises: Mechanisms, solutions and design approaches

Abstract

The goals of flexibility and globalisation force enterprises to both decentralise their activities and continuously (re)structure their network of relationships, to support their business processes: "supply chain" manufacturing, design and innovation. Highly dynamic business processes must be supported by new technological infrastructures that can easily evolve to face continuous changes in the requirements and in the environment in which the application is contextualised. Increasingly, such changes would occur in a self-managed autonomic manner, as applications are running. This chapter focuses on achieving autonomic behaviours in the informative systems for supporting networked enterprises. The chapter starts with motivations; it provides an introduction to the autonomic systems literature and then focuses on the SelfLets framework developed as part of the ArtDeco project to support the autonomicity of the applications. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.