SOAS 2007

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 2007 edition ran as part of SABRE, Software Agents and Services for Business, Research and E-Sciences, with technical sponsorship from the System and Information Sciences Notes journal.