DIVERSIFY: Ecology-inspired software evolution for diversity emergence

Abstract

DIVERSIFY is an EU funded project, which aims at favoring spontaneous diversification in software systems in order to increase their adaptive capacities. This objective is founded on three observations: software has to constantly evolve to face unpredictable changes in its requirements, execution environment or to respond to failure (bugs, attacks, etc.): the emergence and maintenance of high levels of diversity are essential to provide adaptive capacities to many forms of complex systems, ranging from ecological and biological systems to social and economical systems; diversity levels tend to be very low in software systems. DIVERSIFY explores how the biological evolutionary mechanisms, which sustain high levels of biodiversity in ecosystems (speciation, phenotypic plasticity and natural selection) can be translated in software evolution principles. In this work, we consider evolution as a driver for diversity as a means to increase resilience in software systems. In particular, we are inspired by bipartite ecological relationships to investigate the automatic diversification of the server side of a client-server architecture. This type of software diversity aims at mitigating the risks of software monoculture. The consortium gathers researchers from the software-intensive, distributed systems and the ecology areas in order to transfer ecological concepts and processes as software design principles.