Policy and profile: Enabling self-knowledge for autonomic systems

ne standard definition of autonomics is that of self-governance, including such properties as self-configuring, self-healing and self-optimizing. To really enable self-anything, however, we must first deliver another 'self-' property-self-knowledge. We define self-knowledge as information about a system enabling it to reason on its own capabilities and actions. This knowledge can come in many forms but we propose that there are essentially two key elements: knowledge of the individual parts of the system, and knowledge about the rules that determine the interaction of these system components. This paper presents a model describing self-knowledge, with policy for defining rules and profiles to express the individual entities knowledge.