Facilitating a Well-Founded Approach to Autonomic Systems

While it is desirable for all computing and communications systems to have well-defined and verifiable behaviour, autonomic systems must additionally guarantee that their adaptive behaviour is correct, both in the sense of responding appropriately to changes in context and in the sense of continuing to meet the high-level requirements of the system. Ensuring such high levels of "process" correctness poses a significant challenge for system designers. Formal methods provide a valuable tool to assist in the design, analysis and verification processes. The goals of the ACF’s semantics working group is to identify formal techniques that may be applicable to the development of autonomic systems, and to promote the understanding of these techniques within the research community.