Workshop objective

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners, who investigate concepts, methods, techniques, and tools to design and evolve autonomic software. Autonomic computing aims to reduce the complexity of managing software systems. To be autonomic, a system must configure and reconfigure itself, continually optimize itself, recover from malfunction, or protect itself, while keeping its complexity hidden from the user. Understanding software engineering issues is critical for the proliferation of autonomic applications.

Workshop theme

Understanding software engineering issues for autonomic computing systems is critical for the software and information technology sectors, which are continually challenged to reduce the complexity of their systems. To be autonomic, a system must know itself as well as its boundaries and its environment, configure and reconfigure itself, continually optimize itself, recover or heal from malfunction, protect itself, and function in a heterogeneous world—while keeping its complexity hidden from the user. While there are several workshops that deal with autonomic computing systems, there are few workshops that focus on software engineering issues, i.e., how do we design, build, and evolve such software systems so that they can meet given—and evolving—requirements for particular classes of users and/or applications. Most existing systems cannot be re-designed and re-developed from scratch to incorporate autonomic capabilities. Rather self-management capabilities have to be added gradually and incrementally—one aspect at a time. With the proliferation of autonomic applications, users will impose ever-more demands with respect to functional and non-functional requirements for autonomicity.

The goal of this workshop is to exchange opinions, advance ideas, and discuss preliminary results among researchers and practitioners who investigate concepts, methodologies, and tools to design and evolve autonomic software. The topic of self-managed systems has been studied in a large number of specific areas, including databases, robotics, control systems, fault-tolerant computing, agents, adaptive systems, neural networks, and others. In this workshop however, we will concentrate on the design and evolution of autonomic application software.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, architectural styles, attribute-based architectural styles, and architecture patterns for autonomic elements and systems, designing high-variability software, designing self-managed systems, evolving autonomic software, injecting automicity into legacy systems, integration mechanisms, methods for evaluating complex tradeoffs, adoption of autonomic systems, or assessing the user experience in self-managed systems.

Applications of interest include, but are not limited to, web services, applications involving software that helps people with special needs live their lives, software that integrates multiple heterogeneous components, such as an inter-organizational workflow system that coordinates production or service processes, or autonomic systems serving the information economy.

Workshop attendance, format, and registration

This workshop will be run in a highly interactive style on Saturday, May 21, 2005 from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm at the ICSE 2005 conference venue. DEAS 2005 will include invited talks and short position statements. Participants should come to the workshop prepared to engage in lively discussion sessions. The contributions to the DEAS 2005 workshop will be consolidated into a summary report, which is expected to evolve into a roadmap to assist in documenting best software engineering practices for designing and evolving autonomic software applications.

All workshops participants shall register with ICSE 2005, including workshop organizers, chairs, and any special guests or distinguished speakers.

ICSE 2005 will make available AV projection equipment and the workshop organizers will provide a laptop for projection. Speakers please upload your presentation before your session starts.

Paper submission

We invite (1) position papers and progress reports that describe ongoing work or new ideas, (2) short research papers and experience reports that describe validated research results, and (3) survey papers --- all within the scope of the workshop. Papers should be between 4-7 pages long and must not have been previously published or submitted elsewhere. Here is the call for papers in pdf form.

Please submit papers for DEAS 2005 electronically using CyberChairPROv6 at the DEAS 2005 electronic submission web site. Please follow the ICSE 2005 paper format instructions.

Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital library under DEAS 2005 workshop proceedings as part of the ICSE 2005 workshop publications. No formal proceedings will be printed by ICSE, although unofficial proceedings will be made available electronically to workshop participants.