Abstract

Software has become pervasive. Despite this success and expansion into daily life, there have, of course, been a number of software-related disasters and near-disasters. Software failures have resulted in giving cancer patients excessive (and lethal) doses of radiation, loss of aircraft and spacecraft, and disclosures of private financial information. We continue to push software to the limits, in many cases using it where failure would be catastrophic, and where many organizations are spending as much as 33 to 50 percent of the total cost of ownership of their computing and communication systems to avoid software failure. Many practitioners believe that self-managing software can potentially ensure safer, more reliable, and cost-effective computer systems. Creating software systems that are self-directed, self-governing, and self-adapting has been the focus of development in autonomic computing, autonomic communications, pervasive computing, organic computing, and adaptive computing