Abstract

It is a long established fact that the complexity in contemporary software systems is increasing rapidly and so are the costs for maintenance and development of such systems. To relieve the burden of maintaining such complex infrastructures, much effort has been made to make software more dynamic and adaptive. In general, the idea is to make software systems self-managing, which will allow for automatic or semiautomatic changes at run-time in a system's infrastructure and behavior according to the operational context. This entry introduces a special class of software systems termed self-managing software.