SOAS'2006

Today's IT systems, with ever-growing communication infrastructures and computing applications, grow large enough that their engineering, operation and maintenance become exponentially complex, and conventional paradigms for run-time deployment, management and evolution are no longer equal to it. Self-organization and self-management are the most promising answer — but self-organization and adaptation are concepts taken from nature, and computing and communication systems are artificial, so the principles do not transfer directly: openness, scalability, uncertainty and discrete-event dynamics have to be tackled by run-time perception of complexity patterns and run-time enforcement of policies, not by procedures fixed at design time. SOAS was the forum for the latest theoretical and practical results on self-organization and adaptation in multi-agent systems and grid computing, and on autonomic computing and communications. The 2006 edition was held as part of NODe and was organised as five thematic streams in the form of workshops: basic principles and methodologies; self-organization and adaptation of multi-agent systems; self-organizing and autonomic grid computing; autonomic computing in general; and autonomic communications. It was technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society, and all accepted papers appeared as a special issues volume of the International Transactions on Systems Science and Applications.

• Workshop 1: Basic Principles and Methodologies for Self-Organization and Adaptation
• Workshop 2: Self-Organization/Adaptation of Multi-Agent Systems
• Workshop 3: Self-Organizing/Autonomic Grid Computing
• Workshop 4: Autonomic Computing in General
• Workshop 5: Autonomic Communications