In the next few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) will interconnect a huge number of “things”. While IoT has many benefits to change our way of life to the best, it will also exponentially increase the scale and the complexity of existing computing and communication systems. It is impossible for humans to manage manually this huge amount of things. So, such “things” need to adapt automatically to the ever-changing environment and requirements. The future research trend is the development of intelligent and autonomic things, such as autonomic vehicles/robots/networks and smart electronics.
Autonomic computing (Computing, 2006), inspired by biological systems, has been proposed as a grand challenge that will allow the systems to self-manage this complexity, using high-level objectives and policies defined by humans. The objective is to provide some self-x properties to the system, where x can be adaptation, organization, optimization, configuration, protection, healing, discovery, description, etc (Friess, 2013).