Towards autonomic computing: agent-based modelling, dynamical systems analysis, and decentralised control

Autonomic computing aims to deal with the complexity of today systems by letting the system handle the complexity autonomously. This is a very hard and challenging domain because current systems are complex, distributed, interconnected and rapidly changing systems. We firmly believe that a main challenge in conquering autonomic systems is the integration of three existing research communities: the multiagent systems community allows natural modelling of the system and explicitly considers autonomous behaviour and distributed interaction, dynamical systems theory allows analysis of the dynamics of these models and the decentralised control community can use insights gathered from the analysis to create decentralised control mechanisms to control the dynamics of autonomic systems. We describe this generic perspective on autonomic computing, give an overview of the relevant work done in each community and describe the contribution of each community in conquering autonomic computing.