MACE 2010 - The 5th IEEE International Workshop on Modelling Autonomic Communication Environments

The 5th IEEE International Workshop on Modelling Autonomic Communication Environments (MACE 2010) will be held October 28, 2010 in Niagara Falls, Canada. The workshop is sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society, Technical Committee on Network Operations and Management (CNOM). This year, MACE will be co-located with the International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM), the successor of the MANWEEK conference series.

Multi-vendor environments and the services that they provide have dramatically increased the system and business complexity of communications environments. The inherent heterogeneity of network device programming models will be exacerbated by future service offerings, which demand the ability to react to changing user needs, business objectives, and environmental changes in an efficient and cost-effective manner. We define autonomic management as the ability for a system to use knowledge engineering techniques to model itself and the environment in which it is operating. Models of context-awareness, behaviour, and orchestration are an important means of managing complexity and realising business goals. More importantly, models that can evolve in response to new and/or learned information enable the system to adapt to new usage patterns and business rules. This enables the autonomic system to self-govern its behaviour within the constraints of the business goals that are currently applicable.

The MACE workshop will focus on the use of information and data modelling, as well as knowledge representation and inferencing, to represent adaptive and self-aware devices, systems, and networks. MACE addresses current and future network management by focusing on how to represent and use knowledge to provide adaptive, context-aware management, to learn and adjust to user and environmental behaviour, and to orchestrate services using context-aware policy-based management systems, which use modelled knowledge to dynamically generate code to automatically reconfigure network elements in response to changing context.

The 2010 MACE workshop will continue to provide a platform for discussing latest trends, work-in-progress as well as demonstrations, evaluations and simulations. We encourage academic and industry researchers and practitioners, as well as students, to submit their models, concepts, ideas and designs.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Federation and Service Management
Advances in modelling architectural artefacts
Models of and for federations and membership
Achieving balance between autonomic process and human intervention
Semantics for composition of state information (knowledge)
Security Mechanisms and strategies
Creation and analysis of services and software artefacts
Lifecycle management
Design and modelling of meta-data to contextualise, track and manage services and other artefacts

Monitoring and Configuration
Bridging the semantic gap for service-level monitoring
Approaches to normalise management data/information
Models for event analysis to infer service implications
Federated, end-to-end monitoring
Models for adaptive management decision making
Processes for a continuum of management policies (authoring, transformation, verification, optimisation, deployment)
Design of business-driven network configurations
Using context to trigger and select policy-based management
Semantic annotation for visualisation

Self-management
Self-management algorithms and reusability
Robustness in algorithm design
Adaptive algorithms and models, including bio-inspired approaches
Efficiency of adaptation and evaluation techniques
System-based adaptive algorithms, including bio-inspired approaches
Coordination processes
End-to-end management of different types of anomalies