The paper discusses the potential usage of principles from General System Theory (GST) and Cybernetics for design of Autonomic Software. Motivated by the characteristics of open systems and benefits of software communication management, we introduce the abstraction of Managed Communication Channels and propose general purpose architecture for composition and activation of communication channels. We illustrate examples of their application in different aspects of component oriented design for increase of overall system stability. Prototype of framework for autonomic component communication using the discussed principles is presented. existing and new systems, however few of them face the fundamental problem of variety in software from its rootssoftware evolution. This paper presents an approach to complexity management which targets directly the problem of stability in heterogeneous and complex software systems during their life-cycle. The main concept employs usage of principles from theories of open systems and control [26] [40], information theory [10] and software evolution [28][29][30][31]. We state that the process of software development has characteristics, similar to the open systems' nature, such as adaptation, homeostasis and goal-directedness and show how the software architectures can profit from exploiting the Cybernetic laws of Requisite Variety (RV) and Requisite Knowledge (RK) in order to reach higher stability. To achieve this we introduce the abstraction of communication channel manager and observable software variety together with practical examples of their applications for construction of autonomic control loops and usage in common architectural approaches for component-oriented software.
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