Decentralised Metacognition in Context-Aware Autonomic Systems: Some Key Challenges

A distributed non-hierarchical metacognitive architec- ture is one in which all meta-level reasoning compo- nents are subject to meta-level monitoring and manage- ment by other components. Such metacognitive distri- bution can support the robustness of distributed IT sys- tems in which humans and artificial agents are partic- ipants. However, robust metacognition also needs to be context-aware and use diversity in its reasoning and analysis methods. Both these requirements mean that an agent evaluates its reasoning within a “bigger picture” and that it can monitor this global picture from multi- ple perspectives. In particular, social context-awareness involves understanding the goals and concerns of users and organisations. In this paper, we first present a conceptual architecture for distributed metacognition with context-awareness and diversity. We then consider the challenges of apply- ing this architecture to autonomic management systems in scenarios where agents must collectively diagnose and respond to errors and intrusions. Such autonomic systems need rich semantic knowledge and diverse data sources in order to provide the necessary context for their metacognitive evaluations and decisions.