A survey of autonomic computing—degrees, models, and applications

Autonomic Computing is a concept that brings together many fields of computing with the purpose of creating computing systems that self-manage. In its early days it was criticised as being a “hype topic” or a rebadging of some Multi Agent Systems work. In this survey, we hope to show that this was not indeed ‘hype’ and that, though it draws on much work already carried out by the Computer Science and Control communities, its innovation is strong and lies in its robust application to the specific self-management of computing systems. To this end, we first provide an introduction to the motivation and concepts of autonomic computing and describe some research that has been seen as seminal in influencing a large…