Towards a formal model of autonomic services based on SelfLets

Autonomic services are suitable building blocks for highly dynamic applications that must adapt to changing environments, contexts, requirements. When these applications combine a high level of dynamism with dependability requirements (e.g., healthcare systems), the components on which they are built must be precisely designed and their properties must be well understood. Modeling these components in a formal way can help in this regard. In this paper we present the nucleus of a formal model of the concept of SelfLet, which is the building block of an autonomic infrastructure that is being developed in our research group. The formal model includes the core elements that are related to service invocation and execution; it constitutes a solid foundation facilitating and predisposed for the addition of the concepts that have yet to be formalized.