Abstract

Rigorous techniques are needed to develop adaptive systems which can cope with both changes in the environment and with changing goals. The objective is to minimise the degree of explicit management necessary for construction and subsequent evolution whilst preserving the safety properties implied by its specification. In this talk, we focus on an architectural approach to self-management, in which software components automatically configure their interaction as required. We present an outline three-layer reference model as a context in which to articulate some of the main issues and to describe our pilot implementation. In particular we present our current work on plan synthesis from goals and properties.

Biography

Jeff Kramer is Professor of Computing and Senior Dean at Imperial College London. His research interests include rigorous techniques for requirements engineering; software specification, design and analysis; and software architectures, particularly as applied to distributed and adaptive software systems. Jeff is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and the co-recipient of the 2005 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award for his research work in Distributed Software Engineering. He is co-author of a recent book on Concurrency, co-author of a previous book on Distributed Systems and Computer Networks, and the author of over 200 journal and conference publications. He is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the IET, Fellow of the BCS and Fellow of the ACM.