Behavioural Theory and Logics for Distributed Adaptive Systems

A distributed, adaptive system is a system that is composed of communicating, autonomous components. The behaviour of components may be volatile, i.e. components may break down, become unavailable due to network problems or change their behaviour. Thus, the system has to be adaptive to recognise faulty behaviour, adapt itself to new arising situations if possible, and return to its original processing in case the cause of the problem has been removed. Thus, monitoring the system`s environment and adapting the behaviour to critical situations is a defining characteristic of distributed, adaptive systems. For instance, a production cell may comprise several autonomous systems (e.g. controlling welding robots) to perform a joint task (e.g. a welding task in car production). These systems may communicate with each other to assess, if all components are working properly, and to reach a consensus when the task is considered to be completed. In case one of the components becomes malfunctioning, the remaining components should be able to discover the failure, isolate the component and issue a signal that it has to be replaced, and re-allocate the task among themselves if possible. After the faulty component has been replaced or repaired, which could be signalled to the system, the system could return to the original task allocation before the incident. Various production cells of different kind could form a production line. Then the collection of production cells can be controlled by another distributed adaptive system with more adaptation latitude, e.g. changing the order of tasks, using a support component, etc. This may further be extended to the level of a factory with several production lines, and the whole production of a company that is distributed over many factories. The general aim of the project is to develop solid scientific foundations capturing all aspects of distributed adaptive systems in a step-by-step approach. The project aims at clarifying what exactly distributed adaptive systems are, how they can be specified, how properties such as reliability, resilience and robustness can be guaranteed, and how they can be classified. For this the notion of "behavioural theory" will be adopted from Gurevich`s seminal work on the ASM thesis and follow-on research on language-independent characterisation of classes of algorithms.

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