From goals to components: a combined approach to self-management

Abstract

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.