Middleware for Constructing Decentralized Control in Self-Organizing Systems

Abstract

A key requirement to realize modern distributed systems is the ability of systems to autonomously adapt their behavior to changing environmental conditions at runtime, to preserve their operation even in the presence of uncertain changes. In order achieve this, the different parts of such a self-organizing system have to be coordinated to achieve meaningful adaptations. To avoid single point of failures, decentralized control is a key element for the realization of robust and scalable self-adaptation. This paper proposes both a middleware, as well as an engineering approach to realize different decentralized control structures for distributed self-organizing systems. The presented work picks up the concept of Active Components as a design element for loosely-coupled distributed systems and extends it by the proposed middleware and engineering approach. Active Components are conceptually based on the Service Component Architecture but extend the component concept with a concurrency model. They resemble software agents as each component is not only a passive service provider but also provides additional autonomous behavior.