The Principle of Immanence in Event-Based Distributed Systems

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the principle of immanence for autonomic eventbased distributed systems such as collaborative environments on the GRID. On one hand, GRID provides a sound infrastructure for coordinating distributed computing resources and Virtual Organisations (VO). On one other hand, immanence is a principle that emerges from the internal behaviour of complex systems such as social organisations. Although several existing VO models specify how to manage resources, security policies and communities of users, none of them has considered mechanisms that reflect the internal activity to constantly improve the overall system organisation. The AGORA model, proposed in 2004, has been integrated in an experimental collaborative environment platform. After several years of experimentation with communities of scientists from various domains, The AGORA architecture has been enhanced with a novel design approach for VO management. The model is a dynamic system in which the result of interactions are fed back into the system structure. The basic idea is to specify a set of mechanisms to catalyse the collective intelligence of active communities in order to enable a self-organisation of the collaborative environments.