Seeking Closure in an Open World: A Behavioral Agent Approach to Configuration Management

We present a new model of configuration management based upon a hierarchy of simple communicating autonomous agents. Each of these agents is responsible for a ‘‘closure’’: a domain of ‘‘semantic predictability’’ in which declarative commands to the agent have a simple, persistent, portable, and documented effect upon subsequent observable behavior. Closures are built bottomup to form a management hierarchy based upon the pre-existing dependencies between subsystems in a complex system. Closure agents decompose configuration management via a modularity of effect and behavior that promises to eventually lead to self-organizing systems driven entirely by behavioral specifications, where a system’s configuration is free of details that have no observable effect upon system behavior.