Evolving Event-Driven Programs
Mark Crosbie, Eugene Howard Spafford · The MIT Press eBooks · 1996
This paper examines how Genetic Programming has shortcomings in an event-driven environment. The need for event-driven programming is motivated by some examples. We then describe the difficulty in handling these examples using the traditional genetic programming approach. A potential solution that uses colored Petri nets is outlined. We present an experimental setup to test our theory. 1 Introduction In the event-driven paradigm, a program responds to asynchronous events that occur in a system. The program performs no processing of its own, other then to respond to events. These events could correspond to user input (e.g. keyboard or mouse input) or system events (interrupts, alarms or warnings). We view the occurrence of these asynchronous events over time as an event stream. This stream is handled by a dispatch loop that calls an appropriate function to handle each event in turn (see Figure 1). Once the event has been handled, control is returned to the dispatch loop. Such a prog...