Towards formal specification and generation of autonomic policies

Autonomic Computing (AC), self-management based on high level guidance from humans, is increasingly gaining momentum as the way forward in designing reliable systems to hide complexity and conquer IT management costs. Effectively, AC may be viewed as Policy-Based Self-Management. In this paper we look at the motivation for utilizing NASA requirements-based programming technologies for mechanically transforming policies (expressed in restricted natural language, or appropriate graphical notations) into a provably equivalent formal model that can be used as the basis for code generation and other transformations, with the goal of self-generation of provable autonomic policies.