This paper upon looking at the Autonomic Computing architecture and Grid Computing highlights the importance of health check mechanisms to achieve a reflex-healing duel strategy. This will provide new design options for the development of the Autonomic Grid. The resulting pulse monitor is based on extending the existing Grid heart-beat monitor with urgency or anxiety levels such as that used in the NASA beacon monitor. The paper concludes with a discussion that this health check mechanism may be utilized in the future to achieve the necessary sense of urgency within a system for affect and emotion intelligence.

Abstract—Grid computing systems are expected to be more scalable, more survivable from partial systems failures and more adaptive to dynamic network environments in order to improve user experience, expand system’s operational longevity and reduce maintenance cost. Based on the observation that many biological systems have already overcome these requirements, the proposed network architecture, called Symbiotic-Sphere, applies biological concepts and mechanisms to design grid systems (application services and middleware platforms). In SymbioticSphere, each application service and middleware platform is designed as an artificial biological entity, analogous to an individual bee in a bee colony. Application services and middleware platforms implement biological concepts and mechanisms such as decentralization, energy level, healthy level, energy exchange between species, environment sensing, migration, replication and death. Like in biological systems, desirable system characteristics such as scalability, survivability and adaptability emerge from the collective actions and interactions of application services and middleware platforms. This paper presents the architectural design of SymbioticSphere, and describes how application services and middleware platforms act and interact with each other. Preliminary simulation results show that application services and middleware platforms collectively adapt to dynamic changes in the network (e.g. user location, network traffic and resource availability).

Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing [14] involves the notion of calm whereby the system, which may be composed of many very differing forms of computing elements, tailors its operation to best fit the user, application Copyright © 200x Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Abstract. This paper presents SERSE – SEmantic Routing SystEm – a distributed multi-agent system composed of specialised agents that provides robust and efficient gathering and aggregation of digital content from diverse resources. The agents composing SERSE use ontological descriptions to search and retrieve semantically annotated knowledge sources, by maintaining a semantic index of the instances of the annotation ontology. The efficient retrieval is made it possible through the semantic routing mechanism, that permits to identify the agent indexing the resources requested by a user query without having to maintain a central index, and by minimising the number of messages broadcasted to the system. The system is also capable of exhibiting autonomic behaviour. Autonomic behaviour is characterised by self configuration and self healing capabilities, aimed at permitting the system to manage the failure of one or more of its agents and ensure continuous functioning. 1

Summary. The BEYOND architecture applies biological principles and mechanisms to design network applications that autonomously adapt to dynamic environmental changes in the network. In BEYOND, each network application consists of distributed software agents, analogous to a bee colony (application) consisting of multiple bees (agents). Each agent provides a particular functionality of a network application, and implements biological behaviors such as energy exchange, migration, reproduction and replication. This paper describes two key components in BEYOND: (1) a self-regulatory and evolutionary adaptation mechanism for agents, called iNet, and (2) an agent development environment, called BEYONDwork. iNet is designed after the mechanisms behind how the immune system detects antigens (e.g., viruses) and produces antibodies to eliminate them. It models a set of environment conditions (e.g., network traffic) as an antigen and an agent behavior (e.g., migration) as an antibody. iNet allows each agent to autonomously sense its surrounding environment conditions (i.e., antigens) and adaptively invoke a behavior (i.e., antibody) suitable for the conditions. In iNet, a configuration of antibodies is encoded as a gene. Agents evolve their antibodies so that they can adapt to unexpected environmental changes. iNet also allows each agent to detect its own deficiencies to detect antigen invasions (i.e., environmental changes) and regulate its policy for antigen detection. Simulation results show that agents adapt to changing network environments by self-regulating their antigen detection and evolving their antibodies through generations. BEYONDwork provides visual and textual languages to design agents in an intuitive manner. 1

Greater understanding of biology in modern times has enabled significant breakthroughs in improving healthcare, quality of life, and eliminating many diseases and congenital illnesses. Simultaneously there is a move towards emulating nature and copying many of the wonders uncovered in biology, resulting in “biologically inspired ” systems. Significant results have been reported in a wide range of areas, with systems inspired by nature enabling exploration, communication, and advances that were never dreamed possible just a few years ago. We warn, that as in many other fields of endeavor, we should be inspired by nature and biology, not engage in mimicry. We describe some results of biological inspiration that augur promise in terms of improving the safety and security of systems, and in developing self-managing systems, that we hope will ultimately lead to selfgoverning systems. 1.

University, Patiala, is an authentic record of my own work carried out under the supervision of Ms. Inderveer Chana. The matter presented in this thesis has not been submitted for the award of any other degree of this or any other university. (Puneet Khurana) This is to certify that the above statement made by the candidate is correct and true to the best of my knowledge. Countersigned by: (Ms. Inderveer Chana)

Context awareness is a vital element in pervasive and ubiquitous systems. While most existing research has focused on designing context-aware systems to integrate into the environment, less attention has been placed on the interoperability among the entities comprising such systems. In this paper, we consider how the components of a context-aware system can collaborate to achieve a common goal. We provide a taxonomy of such Collaborative Context Awareness (CCA) based on three axis, i.e., goal, approaches and means. We also discuss a number of context-aware systems from different domains, i.e., augmented artefacts, robotics and sensor(/actuator) networks that exhibit some form of collaboration. Finally, we classify the different studied systems according to our taxonomy.