Autonomic Model for Self-Configuring C#.NET Applications

With the advances in computational technologies over the last decade, large organizations have been investing in Information Technology to automate their internal processes to cut costs and efficiently support their business projects. However, this comes to a price. Business requirements always change. Likewise, IT systems constantly evolves as developers make new versions of them, which require endless administrative manual work to customize and configure them, especially if they are being used in different contexts, by different types of users, and for different requirements. Autonomic computing was conceived to provide an answer to these ever-changing requirements. Essentially, autonomic systems are self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protecting; hence, they can automate all complex IT processes without human intervention. This paper proposes an autonomic model based on Venn diagram and set theory for self-configuring C#.NET applications, namely the self-customization of their GUI, event-handlers, and security permissions. The proposed model does not require altering the source-code of the original application; rather, it uses an XML-based customization file to turn on and off the internal attributes of the application. Experiments conducted on the proposed model, showed a successful automatic customization for C# applications and an effective self-adaption based on dynamic business requirements. As future work, other programming languages such as Java and C++ are to be supported, in addition to other operating systems such as Linux and Mac so as to provide a standard platform-independent autonomic self-configuring model.