Carlos Manuel Rodrigues Machado Autonomic Ubiquitous Computing

3 Autonomic Ubiquitous System in Home
Environment
In this chapter, the main components and system structure of an autonomic ubiquitous
system are presented. The requirements to create an autonomic management system are
described. The characteristics as well as the solutions used to manage a distributed system are
presented, having in mind the overall system architecture philosophy of the proposed Autonomic
Ubiquitous System.
3.1 Ubiquitous Computing with Autonomic Computing
The ubiquitous computing systems vision proposes the creation of applications that react to
a situation, learning the behaviour of the users and use it to create intelligent applications that can
assist passively or actively in everyday tasks. The motivation for this vision, formed by Mark Weiser,
is to create the usage of technology effortless - [Weiser, 1991], [Weiser, 1993a] and
[Weiser, 1993b]. The system purpose is to free the user from the details of the technology, which
was named the “Calm technology” as described by Weiser [Weiser and Brown, 1995] where the
technology should not intrude on our lives, but live along with us, in a calmer fashion. To achieve
this, the technology should be invisible but everywhere and embedded in the environment.
Autonomic computing provides the ability of a ubiquitous system to effectively "disappear". It
is a concept that brings together many fields of computing, with the purpose of creating computing
systems that are reflexive and self-adaptive, i.e., the systems works autonomically (without the
interaction of user or administrator) reacting to situations, changing and adapting its behaviour.
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