Gradual Transition Towards Self-Managed Software Systems Based on High-Level Communication Specification

With increasing complexity of software systems, their management becomes more difficult and costly. While management of today’s software systems is usually performed by humans using some user interface (UI), autonomic systems would be self-managed. They would typically consist of a managed element, which provides actual system functionality, and an autonomic manager performing system management. However, truly self-managed systems are difficult to achieve and not (yet) in wide-spread use. It is more realistic to manage a large and complex software system partly by humans and partly by an autonomic manager. To facilitate this approach, the communication between the managed element and human administrators on the one hand and the communication between the managed element and the autonomic manager on the other, should be unified and specified on the same semantic level. In this thesis, we investigate the communication that takes place between a managed system and its manager regardless whether this manager is human or autonomic. To create a specification of the communication that would be high-level and thus easier to understand and create by humans, we looked at theories that attempt to explain and model human communication (both written and spoken). As a result, we have developed the communication specification based on discourse models. Having a unified approach to high-level communication between the managed software system and both its human and its autonomic manager makes the transition towards selfmanaged systems possible. We have evaluated both human and autonomic management cases using the self-management communication platform and demonstrated that our approach facilitates this transition.