To cope with the ever increasing complexity of today's computing systems, the concepts of organic and autonomic computing have been devised. Organic or autonomic systems are characterized by socalled self-X properties such as self-configuration and self-optimization. This approach is particularly interesting in the domain of distributed, embedded, real-time systems. We have already proposed a service-oriented middleware architecture for such systems that uses multi-agent principles for implementing the organic management. However, organic management needs some guidance in order to take dependencies between services into account as well as the current hardware configuration and other application-specific knowledge. It is important to allow the application developer or system designer to specify such information without having to modify the middleware. In this paper, we propose a generic mechanism based on capabilities that allows describing such dependencies and domain knowledge, which can be combined with an agent-based approach to organic management in order to realize self-X properties. We also describe how to make use of this approach for integrating the middleware's organic management with node-local organic management.
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