Autonomic Communications Forum

Creation Date: 2007-09-17 Revision Date: 2007-10-05 Revision 0.5 Document Editors: Peter H. Deussen, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany (peter.deussen@fokus.fraunhofer.de) Antonio Manzalini, Telecom Italia S.p.A, Italy (antonio.manzalini@telecomitalia.it) Table of Contents 1. Goals and Mission 2. Working Group Co-Chairs and Membership 3. Team Size and Responsibilities 4. Scope of Effort 5. Duration of Working Group 6. Required Deliverables 7. Critical Dependencies with other Expert or Working Groups 1. Goals and Mission Autonomic communication systems and networks are considered to provide a number of novel features that will not only be exploited by communities (and the information society as a whole) but will also appear as a determining factor of these communities.

• Stability against changes in their environment (including self-defense), advanced adaptability, and permanent operation involving ongoing evolution are examples of those features. Continuous change both with respect to the internal structure and contextual embedding is a crucial feature of autonomic systems. This however implies that quality assessment approaches that consider systems as stable after their release, and system maintenance as an activity that aims on preservation of stability according to original specs is not longer appropriate.
• Autonomic communication systems will enable for new social interaction types defined by a shift from the “service provider/consuming user” paradigm to a dynamic ecosystems of communities that are service providers and consumers (prosumer paradigm) at the same time, and maintain ad-hoc interactions as well as long-time cooperation in a variety of community contexts. Autonomic communication systems will evolve from tools to active and formative entities within prosumer communities.

Thus autonomic communication systems can be considered as fundamentally different from classical communication systems, and therefore require novel approaches of to assess compliance with respect to a wide spectrum of requirements, ranging from sociological and economical demands to technical ones. More important, because of the adaptive response of autonomic systems according to changing modes of usage, assessment has to be understood as an ongoing activity accompanied with the complete lifecycle of a system. The goal of the AWG is to provide a comprehensive catalog of approaches, supporting the production as well as the operational lifecycle in all phases, including design paradigms, engineering, verification, validation, and testing methods, and performance and quality indicators. The mission of the AWG comprises the collection and unified presentation of available approaches for autonomic systems assessment, to provide a basis for standardization in this area. These approaches strongly depend on the perception of systems both as technological and social entities. An interdisciplinary composition of the working group is therefore recognized as a key factor. 2. Working Group Co-Chairs and Membership Academic Co-Chair: Peter. H. Deussen Industry Co-Chair: Antonio Manzalini The Co-Chairs have been appointed by the ACF Board. The membership will be determined as a part of the ACF community activity. 3. Team Size and Responsibilities This Working Group should contain 50 persons or less. Participants should include, but not be limited to, those engaged in system and mechanism analysis and design, including related areas such as system science, sociology, economics, etc. system validation and assessment methods The AWG will operate in accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised. 4. Scope of Effort The AWG will provide a collection of assessment approaches for autonomic communication systems, mapped to the lifecycle of those systems to identify the applicability of these approaches within a certain development or operational phase. Each considered approach will be presented, and criticized, both from an academic and an industrial perspective by different experts. Additionally, background material will be presented by experts from domains outside ICT whenever needed to understand the origins of an approach (e.g. bio-inspired), and its relationship to those domains (e.g. its socio-economic dimension and related methods). 5. Duration of Working Group The AWG will function for a period of time necessary to complete identified and agreed to deliverables. Deliverables will be produced in an iterative and incremental fashion based on a 180-day release cycle, with two release cycles per year. A release cycle may include the production of new specifications and/or maintenance of existing specifications. New specifications will be initiated by the creation of specification requests which will serve as the statement of work for the new documents. Major revisions or additions to existing specifications will be governed by work item descriptions. 6. Required Deliverables 6.1 Currently Identified Deliverables A Taxonomy of Assessment Goals and Approaches This document will provide comprehensive list of criteria to be validated and corresponding assessment approaches currently discussed in academic and industrial contexts, and will provide a system to classify these approaches according to their types of applicability. Compliance Validation Requirements This document collects the necessary conditions and capabilities (such as (online or offline) testability and run-time observability, etc.) that have to be fulfilled and provided by Autonomic System in order to assess compliance to a given requirement specification or standard. 6.2 Structure of Deliverables Deliverables will be classified by packages describing:

• Requirements and concepts,
• Technology neutral specifications, and
• Mapping to technologies.

A package must contain

• A document describing the package by means of: motivation, goal, approach, definitions, results, experiments, annexes for references etc.

A package may contain

• Implementations or part of implementations in an agreed descriptive, scripting, or programming language plus documentation of this implementation
• Descriptions and/or Specifications in an agreed format that explain how the package can be applied
• Showcases, studies, and other material that might help to understand the concepts and results of the package

The following list of deliverables is required for the first phase of the AWG:

1. Baseline document specifying and explaining the documentations of the AWG, i.e. introducing structure and concepts for each type of deliverable and for a package
2. Baseline documentation that specifies and explains the underlying methodology.
3. Documentation that captures the ACF requirements with regard to architectural concerns, based on contributions from other ACF groups.

7. Critical Dependencies with Other Expert or Working Groups It is critical for the AWG to understand the requirements of all other ACF groups to provide useful architectural documents. Strong dependencies are however recognized with respect to

• The Architecture Expert Group
• The Semantics Working Group
• Services Composability Management Working Group