Jeffrey O. Kephart, David M. Chess
IEEE Computer 36(1), pages 41-50
January 2003
A 2001 IBM manifesto observed that a looming software complexity crisis-caused by applications and environments that number into the tens of millions of lines of code-threatened to halt progress in computing. The manifesto noted the almost impossible difficulty of managing current and planned computing systems, which require integrating several heterogeneous environments into corporate-wide computing systems that extend into the Internet. Autonomic computing, perhaps the most attractive approach to solving this problem, creates systems that can manage themselves when given high-level objectives from administrators.