Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
with sensors, actuators, rules, a control network, management of distributed
sensors and actuators, interrogation, monitoring, and manipulation of
components at runtime through a distributed rule-engine [
3
,
90
,
97
].
8.2.6 Space Systems
As discussed earlier, with the increasing constraints on resources and the
greater focus on the cost of operations, NASA and others have started to
utilize adaptive operations and move toward almost total onboard autonomy
in certain classes of mission operations [
176
,
195
]. Autonomy provides self-
governance, giving responsibility to the agents within the system to meet
their defined goals. Autonomicity provides self-management in addition to
self-governance as essential to a system's ability to meet its own functional
goals. There is also a shared responsibility to ensure the effective manage-
ment (through self-
properties) of the system, which may include respon-
sibilities beyond the normal task-oriented goals of an individual agent. For
instance, monitoring another agent's health signs to ensure self-protection,
self-healing and self-configuration, and/or self-optimization activities take
place as needed. Autonomic computing, then, can be identified as a key tech-
nology [
27
,
66
,
146
,
151
] for future NASA missions, and research is paving the
way for incorporation of both autonomicity and autonomy [
182
]. These will
be discussed in more detail later in Part III of this topic.
∗
8.2.7 Agents for Autonomic Systems
Agents, as autonomous entities, have the potential to play a large role in Au-
tonomic Systems [
49
,
63
,
102
,
105
,
168
,
169
], though, at this stage, there are
no assumptions that agents must necessarily be used in an autonomic archi-
tecture. However, as in complex systems, there are substantial arguments for
designing a system with agents [
75
]. Agents can help provide inbuilt redun-
dancy and greater robustness [
67
], as well as help retrofit legacy systems with
autonomic capabilities [
76
]. With reference to work previously mentioned, a
potential contribution of agents may come from environments that require
either learning, rules, and norms, or agent monitoring systems.
8.2.8 Policy-Based Management
Policy-based management becomes particularly important with the future
vision of autonomic computing, where a manager may simply specify the
business objectives and the system will make it so - in terms of the needed
information and communications technology (ICT) [
94
]. A policy-based man-
agement tool may reduce the complexity of product and system manage-
ment by providing a uniform cross-product policy definition and management
infrastructure [
41
].
