Florian Nafz, Frank Ortmeier, Hella Seebach, Jan-Philipp Steghöfer, Wolfgang Reif. A generic software framework for role-based Organic Computing systems. In ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems. IEEE, 2009.
An Organic Computing system has the ability to autonomously (re-)organize and adapt itself. Such a system exhibits so called self-x properties (e.g. self-healing) and is therefore more dependable as e.g. some failures can be compensated. Furthermore, it is easier to maintain as it automatically configures itself and more convenient to use because of its automatic adaptation to new situations. Design and construction of Organic Computing systems are, however, challenging tasks. The Organic Design Pattern (ODP) is a design guideline to aid engineers in these tasks. This paper introduces a generic software framework that allows for easy implementation of ODP-based Organic Computing Systems. The communication and service infrastructure of the multi-agent system Jadex is leveraged to provide interaction facilities and services to the application. The concepts of ODP are provided as generic, extensible elements that can be augmented with domain-specific behavior. The dynamic behavior of an ODP system is implemented and a generic observer/controller facility is provided. A real-world case study shows the applicability of the proposed approach and the handling of the software.