Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Federating Policy-Driven Autonomous Systems: Interaction Specification and Management Patterns

  • Published:
Journal of Network and Systems Management Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Ubiquitous systems and applications involve interactions between multiple autonomous entities—for example, robots in a mobile ad-hoc network collaborating to achieve a goal, communications between teams of emergency workers involved in disaster relief operations or interactions between patients’ and healthcare workers’ mobile devices. We have previously proposed the Self-Managed Cell (SMC) as an architectural pattern for managing autonomous ubiquitous systems that comprise both hardware and software components and that implement policy-based adaptation strategies. We have also shown how basic management interactions between autonomous SMCs can be realised through exchanges of notifications and policies, to effectively program management and context-aware adaptations. We present here how autonomous SMCs can be composed and federated into complex structures through the systematic composition of interaction patterns. By composing simpler abstractions as building blocks of more complex interactions it is possible to leverage commonalities across the structural, control and communication views to manage a broad variety of composite autonomous systems including peer-to-peer collaborations, federations and aggregations with varying degrees of devolution of control. Although the approach is more broadly applicable, we focus on systems where declarative policies are used to specify adaptation and on context-aware ubiquitous systems that present some degree of autonomy in the physical world, such as body sensor networks and autonomous vehicles. Finally, we present a formalisation of our model that allows a rigorous verification of the properties satisfied by the SMC interactions before policies are deployed in physical devices.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. http://vip.doc.ic.ac.uk/bsn/

  2. http://www.gumstix.com

  3. http://www.ponder2.net

  4. http://alloy.mit.edu/alloy/

  5. http://www.gumstix.com

  6. http://www.k-team.com

  7. http://jamvm.sourceforge.net

  8. By comparison, an empty JamVM and rmiregistry uses about 3,200 KB and 5,900 KB respectively, and a JamVM running an empty Ponder2 instance and rmiregistry uses about 8,200 KB and 5,900 KB respectively.

References

  1. Lupu, E., Dulay, N., Sloman, M., Sventek, J., Heeps, S., Strowes, S., Twidle, K., Keoh, S.-L., Schaeffer-Filho, A.: AMUSE: autonomic management of ubiquitous systems for e-health. Concurr Comput Pract Exp 20(3), 277–295 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. IBM: An architectural blueprint for autonomic computing, 3rd edn. Tech. rep., IBM (2005)

  3. Sloman, M., Lupu, E.: Engineering policy-based ubiquitous systems. Comput. J. 53(7), 1113–1127 (2010). doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxp102

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Asmare, E., Gopalan, A., Sloman, M., Dulay, N., Lupu, E.: Self-management framework for mobile autonomous systems. J. Netw. Syst. Manag. 20, 244–275 (2012). doi:10.1007/s10922-011-9201-5

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Schaeffer-Filho, A., Lupu, E., Dulay, N., Keoh, S.-L., Twidle, K., Sloman, M., Heeps, S., Strowes, S., Sventek, J.: Towards supporting interactions between self-managed cells. In: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on self-adaptive and self-organizing systems (SASO), IEEE Computer Society, Boston, USA, pp. 224–233 (2007)

  6. Schaeffer-Filho, A., Lupu, E., Sloman, M.: Realising management and composition of self-managed cells in pervasive healthcare, in: Pervasive computing technologies for healthcare, 2009. PervasiveHealth 2009. 3rd international conference, pp. 1–8 (2009). doi:10.4108/ICST.PERVASIVEHEALTH2009.5979

  7. Schaeffer-Filho, A., Lupu, E., Sloman, M., Eisenbach, S.: Verification of policy-based self-managed cell interactions using alloy. In: Proceedings of the 10th IEEE international conference on policies for distributed systems and networks, POLICY’09, IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, pp. 37–40 (2009). URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1812664.1812673

  8. Ma, J., Russo, A., Broda, K., Clark, K.: Dare: a system for distributed abductive reasoning. Auton. Agent. Multi Agent Syst. 16(3), 271–297 (2008). doi:10.1007/s10458-008-9028-y

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Hwang, C., Talipov, E., Cha, H.: Distributed geographic service discovery for mobile sensor networks. Comput. Netw. 55(5), 1069–1082 (2011). doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2010.09.015

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Esposito, C., Cotroneo, D., Russo, S.: On reliability in publish/subscribe services. Comput. Netw. (2013). doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2012.10.023

  11. Schmidt, M.-T., Hutchison, B., Lambros, P., Phippen, R.: The enterprise service bus: making service-oriented architecture real. IBM Syst. J. 44(4), 781–797 (2005). doi:10.1147/sj.444.0781

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Singh, J., Eyers, D.M., Bacon, J.: Disclosure control in multi-domain publish/subscribe systems. In: Proceedings of the 5th ACM international conference on Distributed event-based system, DEBS ’11, ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 159–170 (2011). doi:10.1145/2002259.2002283

  13. Zhu, Y., Keoh, S.L., Sloman, M., Lupu, E.: A lightweight policy system for body sensor networks. IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manag. 6(3), 137–148 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Keoh, S.-L., Lupu, E., Sloman, M.: Securing body sensor networks: sensor association and key management. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on pervasive computing and communications, IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, pp. 1–6 (2009). doi:10.1109/PERCOM.2009.4912756

  15. Craven, R., Lobo, J., Lupu, E., Russo, A., Sloman, M.: Policy refinement: Decomposition and operationalization for dynamic domains. In: 7th international conference on network and service management (CNSM). IEEE, pp. 1–9 (2011)

  16. Corapi, D., Ray, O., Russo, A., Bandara, A., Lupu, E.: Learning rules from user behaviour., In: Artificial intelligence applications and innovations III, ser. IFIP international federation for information processing, Iliadis, Maglogiann, Tsoumakasis, Vlahavas, and Bramer, Eds. Springer, US, vol 296, pp. 459–468 (2009)

  17. Ma, J., Broda, K., Russo, A., Lupu, E.: Distributed abductive reasoning with constraints. In: Omicini, A., Sardina, S., Vasconcelos, W. (eds.) Declarative agent languages and technologies VIII ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6619. Springer, Berlin, pp. 148–166 (2011). [Online]. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-20715-0_9

  18. Charalambides, M., Flegkas, P., Pavlou, G., Rubio-Loyola, J., Bandara, A., Lupu, E., Russo, A., Dulay, N., Sloman, M.: Policy conflict analysis for diffserv quality of service management. IEEE Trans. Netw. Serv. Manag. 6(1), 15–30 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Stal, M.: Web services: beyond component-based computing. Commun. ACM 45(10), 71–76 (2002). doi:10.1145/570907.570934

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Meyer, B.: Applying ”design by contract“. Computer 25(10), 40–51 (1992). doi:10.1109/2.161279

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., Vlissides, J.M.: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Professional Computing Series, 1st edn. Addison-Wesley, Boston (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Taylor, R.N., Medvidovi, N., Dashofy, I.E.: Software Architecture: Foundations, Theory, and Practice. Wiley, Hoboken (2009)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  23. Salah, S., Macia-Fernandez, G., Diaz-Verdejo, J.E.: A model-based survey of alert correlation techniques. Comput. Netw. (2013). doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2012.10.022

  24. Cinque, M., Martino, C.D., Esposito, C.: On data dissemination for large-scale complex critical infrastructures. Comput. Netw. 56(4), 1215–1235 (2012). doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2011.11.016

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Schaeffer-Filho, A.: Supporting management interaction and composition of self-managed cells, Ph.D. thesis, Imperial College London, London, UK (2009)

  26. Jackson, D.: Alloy: a lightweight object modelling notation. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol 11(2), 256–290 (2002). doi:10.1145/505145.505149

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Jackson, D.: Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis. The MIT Press, Cambridge (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Milner, R., Parrow, J., Walker, D.: A calculus of mobile processes, I. Inf. Comput. 100(1), 1–40 (1992). doi:10.1016/0890-5401(92)90008-4

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  29. Cardelli, L., Gordon, A.D.: Mobile ambients. In: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on foundations of software science and computation structure (FoSSaCS), Springer, London, UK, pp. 140–155 (1998)

  30. Phillips, A.: Specifying and implementing secure mobile applications in the channel ambient system, Ph.D. thesis, Imperial College London (2006)

  31. Spivey, J.M.: The Z Notation: A Reference Manual. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River (1989)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  32. Bjørner, D., Jones, C.B. (eds.): The Vienna Development Method: The Meta-Language. Springer, London (1978)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  33. Lano, K.: The B Language and Method: A Guide to Practical Formal Development, 1st edn. Springer, Secaucus (1996)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  34. Smaragdakis, Y., Batory, D.: Mixin layers: an object-oriented implementation technique for refinements and collaboration-based designs. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 11(2), 215–255 (2002). doi:10.1145/505145.505148

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Sanchez-Loro, X., Ferrer, J.L., Gomez, C., Casademont, J., Paradells, J.: Can future internet be based on constrained networks design principles? Comput. Netw. 55(4):893–909, special Issue on Architectures and Protocols for the Future Internet (2011). doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2010.12.018

  36. Sanchez-Loro, X., Gonzalez, A., Martin-De-Pozuelo, R.: A semantic context-aware network architecture. In: Future Network and Mobile Summit, Florence, pp. 1–9. IEEE (2010)

  37. Martin, D., Volker, L., Zitterbart, M.: A flexible framework for future internet design, assessment, and operation. Comput. Netw. 55(4):910–918, special Issue on Architectures and Protocols for the Future Internet (2011). doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2010.12.015

  38. Sifalakis, M., Louca, A., Bouabene, G., Fry, M., Mauthe, A., Hutchison, D.: Functional composition in future networks. Comput. Netw. 55(4):987–998, special Issue on Architectures and Protocols for the Future Internet (2011). doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2010.12.006

  39. Hilaire, V., Koukam, A., Rodriguez, S.: An adaptative agent architecture for holonic multi-agent systems. ACM Trans. Auton. Adapt. Syst. 3(1), 1–24 (2008). doi:10.1145/1342171.1342173

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Zambonelli, F., Jennings, N.R., Wooldridge, M.: Developing multiagent systems: the Gaia methodology. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 12(3), 317–370 (2003). doi:10.1145/958961.958963

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Cabri, G., Puviani, M., Zambonelli, F.: Towards a taxonomy of adaptive agent-based collaboration patterns for autonomic service ensembles. In: Collaboration technologies and systems (CTS), 2011 international conference, pp. 508–515 (2011). doi:10.1109/CTS.2011.5928730

  42. Cernuzzi, L., Molesini, A., Omicini, A., Zambonelli, F.: Adaptable multi-agent systems: the case of the gaia methodology. Int. J. Softw. Eng. Knowl. Eng. 21(04), 491–521 (2011). doi:10.1142/S0218194011005384

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Gregory, A.F., Biegel, G., Clarke, S., Cahill, V.: Towards a sentient object model. In: Workshop on engineering context-aware object oriented systems and environments (ECOOSE’2002) (2002)

  44. Veríssimo, P., Cahill, V., Casimiro, A., Cheverst, K., Friday, A., Kaiser, J.: Cortex: towards supporting autonomous and cooperating sentient entities. In: Proceedings of European wireless 2002, Florence, Italy, pp. 595–601 (2002)

  45. Holzer, A., Eugster, P., Garbinato, B.: Alps–adaptive location-based publish/subscribe. Comput. Netw. 56(12), 2949–2962 (2012). doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2012.05.007

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. Kim, J.S., Garlan, D.: Analyzing architectural styles. J. Syst. Softw. 83(7), 1216–1235 (2010). doi:10.1016/j.jss.2010.01.049

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Medvidovic, N., Tajalli, H., Garcia, J., Krka, I., Brun, Y., Edwards, G.: Engineering heterogeneous robotics systems: a software architecture-based approach. Computer 44(5), 62–71 (2011). doi:10.1109/MC.2010.368

    Article  Google Scholar 

  48. Martin, R.C.: Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  49. Liskov, B.H., Wing, J.M.: A behavioral notion of subtyping. ACM Trans. Progr. Lang. Syst. 16(6), 1811–1841 (1994). doi:10.1145/197320.197383

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. Martin RC (2000) The open-closed principle. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp 97–112. URL http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=331120.331143

  51. Lee, S., Wong, T., Kim, H.S.: Improving manageability through reorganization of routing-policy configurations. Comput. Netw. 56(14), 3192–3205 (2012). doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2012.06.014

    Article  Google Scholar 

  52. Lee, S., Wong, T., Kim, H.: Improving dependability of network configuration through policy classification. In: Dependable systems and networks with FTCS and DCC, 2008. DSN 2008. IEEE international conference, pp. 297–306 (2008). doi:10.1109/DSN.2008.4630098

  53. SEAMS ’13: Proceedings of the 8th international symposium on software engineering for adaptive and self-managing systems. IEEE Press, Piscataway (2013)

  54. Schaeffer-Filho, A., Smith, P., Mauthe, A., Hutchison, D., Yu, Y., Fry, M.: A framework for the design and evaluation of network resilience management. In: Proceedings of the 13th IEEE/IFIP network operations and management symposium (NOMS 2012), IEEE Computer Society, Maui, Hawaii, USA, pp. 401–408 (2012)

  55. Schaeffer-Filho, A., Smith, P., Mauthe, A., Hutchison, D.: Network resilience with reusable management patterns. IEEE Commun. Mag. 52(7) (2014)

  56. Zhou, Y., Fang, Y., Zhang, Y.: Securing wireless sensor networks: a survey. IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor. 10(3), 6–28 (2008). doi:10.1109/COMST.2008.4625802

    Article  Google Scholar 

  57. Sterbenz, J.P., Hutchison, D., Cetinkaya, E.K., Jabbar, A., Rohrer, J.P., Scholler, M., Smith, P.: Resilience and survivability in communication networks: strategies, principles, and survey of disciplines. Comput. Netw. 54(8):1245–1265, resilient and Survivable networks (2010). doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2010.03.005

  58. Chen, X., Makki, K., Yen, K., Pissinou, N.: Sensor network security: a survey. IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor. 11(2), 52–73 (2009). doi:10.1109/SURV.2009.090205

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work was partly funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through Grant GR/S68040/01; the International Technology Alliance sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.K. Ministry of Defence under Agreement Number W911NF-06-3-0001; and the EC IST EMANICS Network of Excellence (#26854).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Alberto Schaeffer-Filho

  2. Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Emil Lupu & Morris Sloman

Authors
  1. Alberto Schaeffer-Filho
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Emil Lupu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Morris Sloman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alberto Schaeffer-Filho.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Schaeffer-Filho, A., Lupu, E. & Sloman, M. Federating Policy-Driven Autonomous Systems: Interaction Specification and Management Patterns. J Netw Syst Manage 23, 753–793 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-014-9317-5

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-014-9317-5

Keywords

Search

Navigation