This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Workshop on Modelling Autonomic Communications Environments, MACE 2010, held in Niagara Falls, Canada, in October 2010, as part of the 6th International Conference on Network and Service Management, CNSM 2010. The 10 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 17 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on autonomics in home area networks and multimedia; ontologies, experience, adaptive systems and federation; and modeling for virtualized infrastructure.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third IEEE International Workshop on Modelling Autonomic Communications Environments, MACE 2008, held on Samos Island, Greece, on September 22-26, 2008, as part of the 4th International Week on Management of Networks and Services, Manweek 2008. The 8 revised full papers and 4 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 22 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on autonomic networks, experiences and frameworks; strategies, processes and generation of components; capabilities; and short papers, early work and applied studies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Modelling Autonomic Communications Environments, MACE 2009, held in Venice, Italy, in October 2009, as part of the 5th International Week on Management of Networks and Services, Manweek 2009. The 6 full papers and 3 short papers presented together with one invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 13 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on theory of autonomic management and applying autonomic principles.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security, AIMS 2007, held in Oslo, Norway in June 2007. It covers scalable network management, inter-domain concepts, promises and ubiquitous management, autonomous infrastructure and security, management models, policy interactions, security management, logic and validation, and networks.

Metadata standards in today’s ICT sector are proliferating at unprecedented levels, while automated information management systems collect and process exponentially increasing quantities of data. With interoperability and knowledge exchange identified as a core challenge in the sector, this book examines the role ontology engineering can play in providing solutions to the problems of information interoperability and linked data. At the same time as introducing basic concepts of ontology engineering, the book discusses methodological approaches to formal representation of data and information models, thus facilitating information interoperability between heterogeneous, complex and distributed communication systems. In doing so, the text advocates the advantages of using ontology engineering in telecommunications systems. In addition, it offers a wealth of guidance and best-practice techniques for instances in which ontology engineering is applied in cloud services, computer networks and management systems. Engineering and computer science professionals (infrastructure architects, software developers, service designers, infrastructure operators, engineers, etc.) are today confronted as never before with the challenge of convergence in software solutions and technology. This book will help them respond creatively to what is sure to be a period of rapid development.

The next generation of Business Process Management (BPM) methods and tools will support the development of a new generation of service-enabled applications that change and evolve over time. The trend is moving from relatively stable, organization-specific applications to dynamic ones supporting business processes. This book is an outcome of the International Workshop on Business System Management and Engineering (BSME 2010), held in Malaga, Spain, in June/July 2010, in conjunction with the TOOLS 2010 federated conferences and under the aegis of the EU Network of Excellence on Service Software and Systems (S-Cube). The goal of the workshop was to bring together experts in the fields of business process management, service-oriented architectures, and service security to discuss the current state of research and identify new issues, challenges, and research directions. The results of these discussions are reflected in this book.

New paradigms for communication/networking systems are needed in order to tackle the emerging issues such as heterogeneity, complexity and management of evolvable infrastructures. In order to realize such advanced systems, approaches should become task- and knowledge-driven, enabling a service-oriented, requirement, and trust-driven development of communication networks. The networking and seamless integration of concepts, technologies and devices in a dynamically changing environment poses many challenges to the research community, including interoperability, programmability, management, openness, reliability, performance, context awareness, intelligence, autonomy, security, privacy, safety, and semantics. This edited volume explores the challenges of technologies to realize the vision where devices and applications seamlessly interconnect, intelligently cooperate, and autonomously manage themselves, and as a result, the borders of virtual and real world vanish or become significantly blurred.