This paper presents the design, prototype implementation, and evaluation of a runtime management framework for structured adaptive mesh refinement applications. The framework is capable of reactively and proactively managing and optimizing application execution using current system and application state, predictive models for system behavior and application performance, and an agent based control network. The overall goal of this research is to enable large-scale dynamically adaptive scientific and engineering simulations on distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic execution environments such as the computational “grid”.