Generic Architectures for Individual Self-aware Computing Systems

Making computing systems self-aware calls for appropriate architectural designs of such systems that allow developers to explicitly decide and reason about the system’s self-awareness capabilities. In this context, a critical issue is the development of appropriate reflections that enable self-awareness and that impact the architectural design. This chapter, therefore, discusses generic architectures for pre-reflective, reflective, and meta-reflective self-awareness as well as various forms of constructing reflections while focusing on an individual system as opposed to a collective of self-aware computing systems. Finally, we discuss the presented ideas with respect to existing control schemes and architectural styles for self-adaptive software that seem to be promising for the architectural design of self-aware computing systems.