Extending autonomic architecture for constructing internetware system

Abstract

The scale and complexity of modern software systems keep increasing, especially in the context of Internet. An emerging software paradigm named Internetware was proposed to handle openness, dynamism of software systems in the context of Internet. An Internetware system is composed of self-adaptive and cooperative entities, which impliedly requires autonomy. How to construct a system equipped with these features brings challenge to developers. Autonomic computing that intends to tackle the self-management issues of complex system is helpful to deal with the development and evolution of Internetware software, but the original model of autonomic element in the area can only be used to make a system autonomic. Hence, in this paper, we extend the model of autonomic elements as a basic construct to support the design and construction of Internetware software. Then we compose an architecture for Internetware entity out of extended elements to support constructing Internetware systems. The architecture describe the essential structure of an Internetware entity and make it and most of its modules performing self-adaptiveness and cooperativity possible, which makes our works different from most of those related. A case study is conducted to illustrate our approach and show its applicability.