Towards a model-driven software engineering methodology for organic computing systems

The complexity of computing systems steadily increases and their future administration will soon exceed any human capabilities. A resort to this scenario are self-managing systems that administrate themselves according to high-level policies established by an administrator. Thus systems configure, optimize, protect and heal themselves autonomously making administrative interferences unnecessary. Organic Computing (OC) keeps this track by drawing analogies from biological systems such as ant colonies or dissipative structures, both resulting in emergent behavior. Due to its characteristics agent technology is particularly suitable for an implementation of Organic Computing Systems (OCS). However for a widespread industrial application acceptable software standards are required for both system architecture and software engineering. Therefore we propose a multi-agent system architecture and an appropriate development process as a first step towards a software engineering methodology for OCS. The process is based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) by the OMG and the UML 2 standard as well.