Towards Self-Managing Systems inspired by Economic Organizations

Today's self-managing systems would ideally be able to adapt themselves (their internal structure or behavior), as well as to autonomously participate in larger, self-organizing systems. Analogously, the enterprises or other socio-economic systems autonomously manage themselves - they make decisions on how to adapt their structure and behavior, and how to organize with other entities in the environment. To connect internal self-adaptive with external self-organizational behavior, an enterprise is “aware” of itself and of its environment, and acts according to this awareness. This position paper proposes to address the challenges of a complex distributed self-managing system by making entities in such a system able to adapt themselves similarly to how companies manage themselves in socio-economic systems. To enable the knowledge transfer between these two fields, the paper proposes to utilize symbolic models which will be used by self-managing systems for knowledge representation and reasoning. This will make such systems in a way also self-aware and enable both self-adaptive and self-organizing capabilities. The paper discusses research directions to make this approach possible.