Using autonomous components to improve runtime qualities of software

In the development of software systems, quality properties should be considered along with the development process so that the qualities of software systems can be inferred and predicted at the specification and design stages and be evaluated and verified at the deployment and execution stages. However, distributed autonomous software entities are developed and maintained independently by third parties and their executions and qualities are beyond the control of system developers. In this study, the notion of an autonomous component is used to model an independent autonomous software entity. An autonomous component encapsulates data types, associated operations and quality properties into a uniform syntactical unit, which provides a way to reason about the functional and non-functional properties of software systems and meanwhile offers a means of evaluating and assuring the qualities of software systems at runtime. This study also describes the implementation and running support of autonomous components and studies a case application system to demonstrate how autonomous components can be used to improve the qualities of the application system.