High-level Models of Software-management Interactions and Tasks for Gradual Transition Towards Autonomic Computing (original) (raw)

For making software systems autonomic, it is im-portant to understand and model software-management tasks. Each such task contains typically many interactions between the administrator and the managed software system. We propose to model software-management interactions and tasks in the form of discourses between the administrator and the software system. Such discourse models are based on insights from theories of human communication. This should make them "natural" for humans to define and understand. While it may be obvious that such discourse models cover software-management interactions, we found that they may also represent major parts of the related tasks. So, these well-defined models of interactions and tasks as well as their operationalization allow their execution and automation. Based on this modeling approach, we propose a specific architecture for autonomic systems. This architecture facilitates gradual transition from human-managed towards au-tonomic systems.