AUTONOMOUS SOFTWARE
Michael Rovatsos, Gerhard Weiß · WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks · 2005
Industrial-strength software is reaching a level of inherent complexity which tends to make an effective development, deployment and administration impossible. This has led to a rapidly growing interest in the notion of autonomous software, that is, software which takes over, and encapsulates, action choice and responsibility from its users and operators so that it can handle its complexity on its own. A key condition for the broad acceptance of autonomous software is the availability of a clear notion of autonomy as a software property upon which precise specification schemes for autonomous software systems can be build. There are diverse approaches available in computer science that are useful in this respect. This chapter describes a generic autonomy specification framework which gives an integrated view of these approaches and of the state of the art in specifying autonomy as a software property. 1