Browsing by Author "Roller, Dieter (Prof.Dr.)"

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A viable architecture for autonomic management of distributed software components
(2010) Stoyanov, Emil; Roller, Dieter (Prof.Dr.)
Autonomic Computing is a brand of system design approaches which enable IT systems with self-management capabilities such as self-configuration, self-healing, self-protection and self-optimization. Although the field of distributed system management has achieved considerable advances, building autonomic management solutions for heterogeneous component-based systems presents five major challenges. First, component deployment and its management gets difficult with the growth of the system, because of the variety of component models with their own specifics. Second, each component framework provides its own way and interface for management creating redundancy and variety of management routines. Third, software components evolve separately which introduces problems with compatibility upon system upgrade. Forth, there are remote dependencies which are difficult to tack and this may cause unpredicted inconsistency of the system after component update. Finally, the integration of a management sub-system influences the overall system complexity by making it dependent on interfaces and functionality of the management module. This thesis introduces an architectural approach which addresses these challenges. An organizational meta-model represents the architectural constraints for encapsulation of software components and defines requirements for feedback loops adapted from the Viable System Model for software components. It enables modeling of viable organization and communication management on the levels of component deployment and runtime operations. The autonomic management architecture consists of modules that facilitate monitoring component states, an operation manager that allows inspection of distributed dependencies by utilizing the notion of the managed communication channel. Its design conforms with the recommendations of the proposed organizational model. A channel management middleware implements the necessary functionality for establishing communication channels and provides interfaces for integration of autonomic managers which follow the requirements of the organizational and communication model. A prototype of the middleware has been developed to implement the architectural approach for real-world scenarios in two separate domains - Smart Home and Distributed Product Development Support Systems. It has demonstrated the usability of the architecture by satisfying the management requirements of these domains and addressing the management challenges.