Self-aware systems for the Internet-of-Things

The IoT will host a large number of co-existing cyber-physical applications. Continuous change, application interference, environment dynamics and uncertainty lead to complex effects which must be controlled to give performance and application guarantees. Application and platform self-configuration and self-awareness are one paradigm to approach this challenge. They can leverage context knowledge to control platform and application functions and their interaction. They could play a dominant role in large scale cyber-physical systems and systems-of-systems, simply because no person can oversee the whole system functionality and dynamics. IoT adds a new dimension because Internet based services will increasingly be used in such system functions. Autonomous vehicles accessing cloud services for efficiency and comfort as well as to reach the required level of safety and security are an example. Such vehicle platforms will communicate with a service infrastructure that must be reliable and highly responsive. Automated continuous self-configuration of data storage might be a good basis for such services up to the point where the different self-x strategies might affect each other, in a positive or negative form. This paper contains three contributions from different domains representing the current status of self-aware systems as they will meet in the Internet-of-Things and closes with a short discussion of upcoming challenges.