Self-organising software architectures for distributed systems

Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems

Kramer

2011

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Autonomous systems need to support dynamic software adaptation in order to handle the complexity and unpredictability of the execution environment, and the changing needs of the end user. Although a number of approaches have been proposed, few address a key issue: that of distribution.In this paper we seek to overcome the limitations of centralised approaches. We build on our previous work on adaptive self-assembly within the three-layer model for autonomous systems to provide a decentralised technique for self-assembly. To achieve this in a fault-tolerant and scalable manner, we use a gossip protocol as a basis. While no central or leader node is aware of the full space of solutions, gossip ensures that agreement on a particular solution-in this case a component configuration-is reached in a logarithmic number of steps with respect to the size of the network.

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

FlashMob

Sykes

Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems

Kramer

2011

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“…Georgas and Taylor [9] describe a system where change is enacted by architectural policies which are invoked in response to certain events such as component failure. Georgiadis [10] describes a distributed approach to enforcing architectural constraints, though ultimately repairs are specified by the programmer.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

From goals to components

Sykes

Heaven

Proceedings of the 2008 International Workshop on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems

et al. 2008

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Autonomous or semi-autonomous systems are deployed in environments where contact with programmers or technicians is infrequent or undesirable. To operate reliably, such systems should be able to adapt to new circumstances on their own. This paper describes our combined approach for adaptable software architecture and task synthesis from high-level goals, which is based on a three-layer model. In the uppermost layer, reactive plans are generated from goals expressed in a temporal logic. The middle layer is responsible for plan execution and assembling a configuration of domain-specific software components, which reside in the lowest layer. Moreover, the middle layer is responsible for selecting alternative components when the current configuration is no longer viable for the circumstances that have arisen. The implementation demonstrates that the approach enables us to handle non-determinism in the environment and unexpected failures in software components.

“…Currently, we have built some decentralised [22] and centralised systems [23] that utilise the idea of implicit structural spepcification and have looked at analysing strucural constraints. However, there are many open questions that remain in building large and scalable systems and in specifying and analysing the behaviour of such systems.…”

Section: Implicit Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

Engineering distributed software

Kramer

SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes

2005

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The role of structure in specifying, designing, analysing, constructing and evolving software has been the central theme of our research in Distributed Software Engineering. This structural discipline dictates formalisms and techniques that are compositional, components that are context independent and systems that can be constructed and evolved incrementally. This extended abstract overviews our development of a structural approach to engineering distributed software and gives indications of our future work which moves from explicit to implicit structural specification. With the benefit of hindsight we attempt to give a "rational history" to our research.