Patent ID: 7089299

Claim:
A method of programmatically determining whether application program components are suited for deployment at an edge of a computing network, comprising steps of: retrieving a P-element vector V(P) containing a numeric value for each of P characteristics of a particular executable application program component to be potentially deployed at the edge, where P>1, each of the characteristics pertaining to executable code of the application program component and each of the numeric characteristic values specifying whether this characteristic is important for this application program component; retrieving an E-element vector V(E) containing a numeric value for each of E characteristics of an operating environment in which the deployment at the edge is to potentially occur, where E>1, each of the characteristics pertaining to execution of code in the operating environment and each of the numeric characteristic values specifying whether this characteristic is applicable for the operating environment; retrieving a P×E-dimension policy matrix M(PE) containing numeric values which express how dependent each of the characteristics of the application program components is on each of the characteristics of the operating environment; and using matrix multiplication to programmatically combine the vector V(P), the vector V(E), and the policy matrix M(PE) to yield a result which determines whether the particular application program component is suited for deployment at the edge of the computing network.