The increasing complexity, heterogeneity and dynamism of networks, systems and applications have made our computational and information infrastructure brittle, unmanageable and insecure. This has necessitated the investigation of an alternate paradigm for system and application design, which is based on strategies used by biological systems to deal with similar challenges of complexity, heterogeneity, and uncertainty, i.e. autonomic computing. Project AutoMate investigates conceptual models and

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... implementation architectures to enable the development and execution of self-managing applications. It supports the definition of autonomic elements, the development of autonomic applications as the dynamic and opportunistic composition of these autonomic elements, and the policy, content and context driven execution and management of these applications. This paper introduces AutoMate architecture and describes the Rudder coordination framework and its use in enabling autonomic behaviors.