Submission extended until May 22, 2009
Modelling Behavioural Orchestration of Autonomic Systems Communications and Services
The fourth IEEE International Workshop on Modelling Autonomic Communication Environments (MACE 2009) will be held October 26-27, 2009 in Venice, Italy. The workshop is sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society, Technical Committee on Network Operations and Management (CNOM), and the Autonomic Communications Forum (all pending).
MACE will be co-located with five other events in order to strengthen the links between our respective communities. These co-located conferences are the 20th International Workshop on Distributed Systems: Operations and Management (DSOM 2009), the 12th International Conference on Management of Multimedia Networks and Services (MMNS 2009), the 9th Workshop on IP Operations and Management (IPOM 2009), and the 6th International Workshop on Next Generation Networking Middleware (NGNM 2009).
The essence of autonomic management is the ability for a system to self-govern its behaviour within the constraints of the business goals that the system as a whole seeks to achieve. The explosive growth of the Internet, the proliferation of mobile networks and the increasing difficulty in managing multi-vendor environments and the services that they are meant to provide have dramatically increased the system and business complexity of communications environments. The inherent heterogeneity of network device programming models and operational and management data has created a gulf between the resources and services that are provided and the business needs of providers and their customers. This 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.
The MACE workshop will discuss the use of information and data modelling, as well as knowledge representation and inferencing, to capture information relating to network capabilities, environmental constraints and business policies. This information will be used to orchestrate service behaviour through context-aware policy-based management systems, which use modelled knowledge to dynamically generate code to automatically configure network elements in response to changing user needs, business goals and/or environmental context. This realises an autonomic control loop, in which the system senses changes in itself and its environment, analyses these data to ensure that business goals and objectives are being met, expedites changes should these goals and objectives be threatened, and observes the result to ensure that closed-loop operation is maintained. This foundation is augmented by reasoning and learning mechanisms to enhance and evolve this knowledge.
SCOPE OF MACE 2009
The MACE programme will provide technical sessions, panel discussions and a keynote address. We invite researchers, engineers and developers from academia and industry to submit their early stage ideas, ongoing work and results. All papers in the areas of modelling and management for autonomic communications will be considered. Submissions in the main topics of interest below are especially encouraged. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Autonomic Network Management
- Self-* capabilities, such as self-configuration and self-awareness
- Configuration and monitoring, and their inter-relationships
- Correlation between network conditions and business concepts (e.g., between device alarms and SLA agreements)
- Governance models (e.g., policy-based management and promise theory)
- Context-awareness, and how functionality is managed as context changes
- Engineering of evolution and emergent behaviour
- Stability against changes in the environment (including self-defence)
- Integrating Contracts with Policy Management and Promise Theory
- Decentralization and cooperation of autonomic managers
- Prototypes, implementations, simulations and test beds of autonomic systems
- Case studies for autonomic network management
- Machine Learning, Reasoning, and Inference Techniques applied to autonomic systems
- Modelling and Knowledge Engineering for Managing Autonomic Systems
- Advances in modelling and meta-modelling
- Ontologies, semantic models, and inferencing
- Model transformations (especially between models of different abstraction layers: Business, Service, Network and Resources models)
- Modelling the interaction between autonomic systems and society
- Mathematical models of autonomic systems, networks and components
- Biologically-inspired techniques and algorithms for autonomic design and operation
- Domain-Specific Models for Autonomic Communications
- The use of domain-specific models to orchestrate network and service functionality
- Models for negotiating service-, network-, component- and/or device-level functionality
- Network-specific resource and service models (e.g., for IMS, IPTV, IP QoS and Routing) that operate using or exhibit autonomic behaviour
- Autonomic wireless access, cognitive radio, and seamless mobility
- Algorithms and processes for network robustness and performance
- Autonomic Communication Mechanisms for Service Composability
- Models for autonomic service and/or resource composition
- Ontologies and semantic mechanisms to govern service and resource composition
- Policies for governing resource and service composability
- Service feature interaction and orchestration mechanisms
PAPER SUBMISSION
Paper submissions must present original, unpublished research or experiences. Late-breaking advances and work-in-progress reports from ongoing research are also encouraged to be submitted. However, papers that are published, or concurrently submitted to another journal, conference, workshop or book MUST NOT be submitted.
All papers should be written in English, accompanied by a 75 to 200 word abstract that clearly outlines the scope and contributions of the paper and a list of key words. There is a length limitation of 12 pages (including title, abstract, all figures, tables, and references) for regular conference papers, and 4 pages for short papers describing work in progress. Submissions MUST BE in LNCS format. Submitted papers not following these guidelines are subject to being dismissed without review.
Authors should submit their papers (full or short) electronically (PDF, postscript, or Word) via JEMS (https://submissoes.sbc.org.br/).
PROCEEDINGS
The MACE 2009 proceedings will be published in Springer-Verlag's Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. For more information regarding manuscript format please visit the author's instruction links at LNCS Springer. Awards will be presented to the best paper and to the best student paper at the workshop. Furthermore, we plan to invite best papers of MACE 2009 to be submitted as extended versions to the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management - TNSM (http://www.comsoc.org/etnsm/).
IMPORTANT DEADLINES
- Paper registration: May 22, 2009
- Paper submission: May 22, 2009
- Author notification: June 30th, 2009
- Camera ready papers due: July 18th, 2009
- Workshop: October 26th – 27th, 2009
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