Call for ACF Participation
The Autonomic Communication Forum (ACF) is undertaking a major new initiative to develop standards to support the development of future interoperable autonomic systems. Starting at MANWEEK 2007 the ACF will be distributing an open call for active participation in the development of new standards.
The ACF was established at the end of 2004 following an initiative by the EU funded Autonomic communication Accompanying Action project. Global interest quickly grew from both industry and academia through the Workshop on Autonomic Communication (now the Autonomic Networking conference) and further project funding from the EU.
At the Autonomic Networking conference in Paris in 2006 John Strassner of Motorola Lab US, observed the lack of coherence in the wide range of research and development activities being conducted internationally and proposed that the ACF should undertake:
- Unify current thinking in autonomics by creating a new set of ACF sanctioned Autonomic Standards, focusing firstly on the management of systems, and secondly on computing and communications using autonomic mechanisms.
- Create an organisational structure that will empower academia and industry to work together in developing and maintaining the above goal.
The community responded enthusiastically to this call for action and has been building a new organisational structure for the ACF. This is driven by a board of directors, chaired by John Strassner, who have been guiding the formation of a number of chartered technical groupings. A key feature of all technical groups is that they possess both an industrial and academic co-chair, in order to maximise the flow of scientific results into usable autonomic standards. The chartering of groups is overseen by an Architecture Committee (co chairs Joel Fleck of HP and David Lewis of Trinity College Dublin) and to date the following technical groups have been formed:
- Architecture Expert Group
- Modelling Expert Group
- Policy Expert Group
- Service Composibility Management Working Group
- Semantics Working Group
The ACF is now actively seeking to recruit committed individuals to these working group to ensure the standardisation and verification of sound specification that represent the best state of the art in autonomic communication concepts and solutions from around the world.