Today’s distributed systems are more and more\ud
complex, so they are required to be autonomic, i.e., to exhibit\ud
some self-* properties in order to manage themselves. Autonomic\ud
systems are usually composed of different components, which\ud
collaborate to achieve a global goal or to provide a high-level\ud
service. The collaboration pattern is usually defined statically,\ud
but the aim of this paper is to show that there are motivations to\ud
enable composed systems to change their collaboration pattern at\ud
runtime in an autonomous way, starting from some case studies.\ud
This capability of autonomic systems is called self-expression,\ud
meaning that a system can express itself despite unexpected\ud
situations. Moreover, we propose three perspective solutions that\ud
aim at enabling the change at runtime: role-based, descriptionbased,\ud
and Artificial Immune Systems (AIS)-inspired