Antonis M. Hadjiantonis

Towards self-managing systems inspired by economic organizations

Todays self-managing systems would ideally be able to adapt themselves (their internal structure or behavior), as well as to autonomously participate in larger, self-organizing systems. Analogously, the enterprises or other socio-economic systems autonomously manage themselves — they make decisions on how to adapt their structure and behavior, and how to organize with other entities in the environment. To connect internal self-adaptive with external self-organizational behavior, an enterprise is “aware” of itself and of its environment, and acts according to this awareness. This position paper proposes to address the challenges of a complex distributed self-managing system by making entities in such a system able to adapt themselves similarly to how companies manage themselves in socio-economic systems. To enable the knowledge transfer between these two fields, the paper proposes to utilize symbolic models which will be used by self-managing systems for knowledge representation and reasoning. This will make such systems in a way also self-aware and enable both self-adaptive and self-organizing capabilities. The paper discusses research directions to make this approach possible.

Autonomic management of mobile and wireless networks

Autonomic management is receiving intense interest from academia and industry, aiming to simplify and automate network management operations. Autonomic management or self-management capabilities aim to vanish inside devices, relieving both managers and users from tedious configuration and troubleshooting procedures. Ideally, self-managed devices integrate self-configuration, self-optimization, self-protection and self-healing capabilities. When combined, these capabilities can lead to adaptive and ultimately self-maintained autonomic systems.

On the complexities of interdependent infrastructures for wide area monitoring systems

Electric power systems (EPS) evolved over years from local independent entities towards large interconnected networks monitored and controlled by sophisticated ICT technologies, and which, eventually will be transformed into Smart Grids where also distributed energy sources, storage, electric vehicles and appliances will be active components of the system. Thus, the scale of complexity involved in present and future power systems architectures is significantly greater than in the past. This paper aims to discuss the interdependency between electric power and communication systems under the system of systems concept. The nature and scale of interdependency between these two critical systems is then further analyzed using an example of disturbance on communications and observing the cascading effects on the power systems monitoring process. Specifically, the impact on the state estimation accuracy is investigated, as a result of a communication node failure, which is responsible for transferring Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) data to the control center.

Electrical power systems protection and interdependencies with ICT

This section discusses the protection of electrical power systems (EPS) and its relation to the supporting Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructure. Several dimensions are addressed, ranging from the need of protection and available protection schemes to the identification of faults and disturbances. The challenges brought by recognizing the interdependent nature of todays and futures EPS and ICT infrastructures are also highlighted, based on the Smart Grid and the System of Systems perspectives.

Introduction to social and policy implications of communication technologies

This chapter delves into the far reaching socio-economic drivers and constraints of telecommunications and communications media, and hinges on a diversity of policies not just about technical access to them and pricing, but more importantly about the social and freedom-of-expression rights. After all, communications systems and services are there to serve peoples interactions. Therefore this chapter presents four different aspects of telecommunications, dealing with topics largely ignored in the past and in telecommunications and media, i.e. social implications and policy aspects of broadcast media.

Towards Autonomic Wireless Networking for the Future Internet

Over the last few decades, the Internet has grown exponentially, bringing about hard questions about its future sustainability. At the same time, the proliferation of wireless and mobile devices with Internet connectivity has created a new landscape for a wireless future Internet. It is evident that in the emerging “Future Internet” (FI), wireless and mobile networking will remain significantly important, but at the same time increasingly complicated. This paper discusses the importance of influencing the ongoing design of the FI to fully integrate mobile and wireless networks in a simplified, automated, and scalable manner. Through this discussion, it is proposed that seamless wireless networking in the FI will be achieved by applying “autonomic concepts” based on policies. The aim is to address the lack of critical functionality from today’s Internet, namely management decentralization, seamless mobility, and spontaneous communications, through the adoption of distributed policy-based management (PBM).