Composing Emergent Behaviour in a Fault Intolerant System

We adopt a layered approach to autonomic systems to simplify the specification, implementation and evaluation of self-* behaviours. Our approach is to develop a suite of tools that interoperate in a layered manner to permit generic autonomic behaviours to be incorporated into a wide range of applications. The layered architecture has been designed such that autonomy is achieved in two dimensions. Vertical autonomy exists between the independently functioning layers whilst horizontal autonomy is achieved between nodes, which remain independent while having specific roles in each layer. This paper exemplifies our approach by presenting an emergent solution to the management of air-space. Simulation and visualisation models have been developed for both the cluster and application layers. We analyze performance using these simulations