Call for Papers

The 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Modeling Autonomic Communication Environments (MACE 2008) will be held September 25-26, 2008 on Samos Island, Greece. The workshop is sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society, Technical Committee on Network Operations and Management (CNOM) and the Autonomic Communications Forum (ACF).

As in the last 2 years, MACE will be co-located with five other events in order to strengthen the links between our respective communities. These co-located conferences are the 19th International Workshop on Distributed Systems: Operations and Management (DSOM 2008), 11th International Conference on Management of Multimedia and Mobile Networks and Services (MMNS 2008), the 8th Workshop on IP Operations and Management (IPOM 2008), the 5th International Workshop on Next Generation Networking Middleware (NGNM 2008) and the 4th International Workshop on End-to-End Virtualization and Grid Management (EVGM 2008).

The essence of autonomic management is the ability for a system to self-govern its behavior within the constraints of the business goals that the system as a whole seeks to achieve. The MACE workshop will discuss the use of information modeling to capture knowledge relating to network capabilities, environmental constraints and business goals/policies, together with ontological engineering to provide inferencing capabilities. This foundation is supplemented by reasoning and learning mechanisms to enhance and evolve this knowledge. Policy-based network management systems incorporating translation/code generation will use this knowledge to automatically configure network elements in response to changing business goals and/or environmental context. This realizes an autonomic control loop, in which the system senses changes in itself and its environment, analyses these data to ensure that business goals and objectives are being met; expedites changes should these goals and objectives be threatened, and observes the result to ensure that closed-loop operation is maintained.

Based on the previous years, this yearâ??s MACE will provide technical sessions, panel discussions and a key note address. We invite researchers, engineers and developers from academia and industry to submit their early stage ideas, ongoing work and results. All papers in the areas of modeling and management for autonomic communications will be considered. Submissions in the main topics of interest below are especially encouraged.


Themes and Topics

Autonomic Network Management

* Self-* capabilities, such as self-configuration, self-optimization and self-healing
* Configuration and monitoring
* Fault detection and automatic resolution
* Correlation between network conditions (i.e. alarms) and SLA agreements
* Case studies for autonomic network management
* Decentralization and cooperation of autonomic managers


Modeling and Knowledge Engineering for Managing Autonomic Communication Environments

* Advances in Modeling and Meta-Modeling
* Model-, Language- and Domain driven Development
* Ontologies, semantic models, and model transformations for ACEâ??s
* Modeling techniques integrating the expanded society and Autonomic Systems
* Methodologies (incl. Lifecycle, Behavior, Design by Contract) for Autonomic Systems
* Mathematical Models of Autonomic Systems, Networks and Components
* Biologically-inspired Techniques and Algorithms for Autonomic Design and Operation


Engineering & Assessment â?? towards a â??science of designâ??

* A Taxonomy of Autonomic Engineering and Assessment Approaches
* Engineering of evolution, direction and emergent behavior (efficient governance and mastered emergence) for autonomic systems
* Engineering principles and methodology for the cooperation of autonomic systems
* Engineering of service aggregation and diversification for autonomic systems
* Stability against changes in the environment (including self-defense) for autonomic systems
* Prototypes, implementations, simulations and testbeds of Autonomic Systems


Interoperability and Governing Mechanisms for Autonomic Systems

* Applying Policy-based Management to Autonomic Systems
* Applying Promise Theory to Autonomic Systems
* Enhancing existing models (i.e., DEN-ng) to include different types of policy rules and representations (e.g., goal and utility function policies) for autonomic systems
* Models that facilitate clear separation of functionality and address distribution issues
* Policy rule conflict detection and resolution
* Security (including admission control) policy models
* Integrating Contracts with Policy Management and Promise Theory


Domain-specific Models for Autonomic Communications

* Models for Autonomic, Policy-based Management
* Models for Autonomic Systems and Components Using Promise Theory
* Models for negotiating service, network, component and/or device level functionality
* Network specific models, i.e., for IMS, IPTV, IP QoS and Routing, that operate or exhibit autonomic behavior
* Traffic Management
* Autonomic Wireless Access and Seamless Mobility
* Machine Learning, Reasoning, and Inference Techniques applied to autonomic systems
* Algorithms and Processes for Network Robustness and Performance


Autonomic Communication Mechanisms for Service Composability

* Requirements for autonomic service composition
* Models for autonomic service and/or resource composition
* Policies for service composition
* Service Ontologies, Semantics and Syntax to govern composition
* Information models for autonomic composable service and resource building blocks
* Service feature interaction and orchestration mechanisms
* Service composition concepts for Network, Service and Application Layers


SUBMISSION

Paper submissions must present original, unpublished research or experiences. Late-breaking advances and work-in-progress reports from ongoing research are also encouraged to be submitted. Papers that are published or concurrently submitted to another journal, conference, or book MUST NOT be submitted. All papers should be written in English, accompanied by a 75 to 200 word abstract that clearly outlines the scope and contributions of the paper and a list of key words.

* Long papers (up to 12 single-spaced single-column pages)
* Short papers describing work-in-progress (up to 4 pages)

Submissions are requested to be strictly in LNCS format. Submissions exceeding the limit, or not in the requested format will not be reviewed.

PROCEEDINGS

The MACE 2008 proceedings will be published in Springer-Verlag's Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. For more information regarding manuscript format please visit the author's instruction links at LNCS Springer. Awards will be presented to the best paper and to the best student paper at the conference. Furthermore, we plan to invite best papers of MACE 2008 to be submitted as extended versions to the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management - TNSM.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES

* Submission: April 28 2008
* Notification: June 13 2008
* Camera ready: June 30 2008
* Workshop: September 22-26