Special Issue on Engineering of Autonomic Systems

IT is a true honor and great pleasure for us to be able to present a special issue on the Engineering of Autonomic Systems in the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics—Part C: Applications and Reviews. The direct roots of this special issue can be traced back to 2003 at IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Computer-Based Systems (ECBS), where began the process to organize the Engineering of Autonomic Systems (EASe) workshop for the following year's conference. The indirect roots of autonomic systems (autonomic computing and autonomic communications) lie of course in the many years of research in communities such as intelligent systems, cybernetics, and AI as well as software engineering, fault-tolerant computing, and dependability. The advent of autonomic computing in 2001 and the other self-managing initiatives marks a point where these specialized research areas become mainstream under an overarching strategic vision for the future of computer-based systems.