The concept of Autonomic Management is receiving intense interest from both
academia and industry since it emerges as an appealing solution to the increasing complexity of managing IT systems. This document provides a detailed view of today’s Next Generation Management Technologies and Approaches to SupportAutonomic Management. It is the outcome of ongoing research integration andcollaboration among partners of EMANICS Network of Excellence and in particularWork Package 9 (WP9: Autonomic Management). Having investigated Frameworks and Approaches for Autonomic Management of Fixed QoS-enabled and Ad Hoc Networks, those results were published in Deliverable D9.1. Building on that knowledge, this deliverable provides a concrete view of technologies and approaches that can realise Autonomic Management. This realisation is at itsinfancy and the presented ongoing research efforts are only the first steps to tackle such a colossal task. However, tangible benefits like self-configuration, self-healing and self-optimization fuel interest and motivate our work.

The policy-based management (PBM) paradigm is often linked directly to autonomic management. The specification of high level objectives and their automated deployment and lifecycle management within complex networks make PBM approaches andtechnologies important candidates for Autonomic Management realisation. In Chapter 2 we explore the critical aspects of policy analysis, having identified the importance of consistency and automated conflict resolution for policy-based systems.Autonomic Management can benefit from Web Services-based approaches byexploiting their unique features. Self-configuration can be significantly simplified if build on a platform independent and interoperable framework based on Web Services. In addition, self-awareness and self-optimisations can be catered by a WS-basedmonitoring and notifications framework. In Chapter 3 we present an overview of Web Services technology and identify how Autonomic Management can benefit.Technologies based on XML, including Web Services, can provide a richcommunications framework that goes over the limitations of traditional management protocols and is open to a large developer community.An autonomic system can be viewed as a system capable of managing itself andadapting to changes in accordance with policies and objectives defined by a human administrator. This system can interact with other autonomic systems to perform collaborative tasks. In this case, trust is a crucial issue to evaluate how an autonomic system (or an autonomic component) is reliable and if it will interact properly when it is solicited by another one. Therefore in Chapter 4 we investigate issues of trust and misbehaviour in Autonomic Systems.

We present recent efforts towards context awareness since this is a critical
requirement for autonomic systems. Chapter 5 follows a thorough investigation of context awareness in D9.1 and presents here novel efforts and techniques.

Finally, Chapter 6 provides an overview of inspiration domains for systems with self management capabilities and outlines potential directions and ideas for our future work.