Call for Papers

Second International Workshop
on Self Adaptive Software

Meeting, Hotel Uni, Balatonfüred, Hungary
17-19, May, 2001.

Balatonfüred is a small village at lake Balaton, approx. 120 km from Budapest.

Please circulate this call for papers to interested colleagues.

We are organizing the second in a series of annual International Workshops on Self Adaptive Software. The workshop will focus on theories, technologies and methodology needed to produce software that is robust to changes in its environment by self monitoring and adaptation.

To date, the bulk of software has been written for users of central or personal computers, and computation relates to a "virtual" world. It is already the case that most processing chips are used in embedded systems, though these are currently primitively programmed. The new millennium will increasingly bring computation out of the virtual environment and into the world. Mobile robots, space exploration, and distributed network computing are all examples of new applications in which the relationship of the computation to its environment is crucial and in which it is necessary for the software to be aware of its environment, monitor its relationship with the environment and adapt as necessary in order to operate robustly. So far the limited uses of self-adaptive software have been constructed in an ad hoc way. We are seeking to develop a reasoned approach to the development of these systems that will be foundation for these future systems.

One definition of self adaptive software was provided in a DARPA Broad Agency Announcement on Self adaptive Software (BAA-98-12) in December of 1997 (see http://www.darpa.mil/ito/Solicitations/PIP_9812.html):

Self adaptive software evaluates its own behavior and changes behavior when the evaluation indicates that it is not accomplishing what the software is intended to do, or when better functionality or performance is possible.

This implies that the software has multiple ways of accomplishing its purpose, and has enough knowledge of its construction to make effective changes at runtime. Such software should include functionality for evaluating its behavior and performance, as well as the ability to replan and reconfigure its operations in order to improve its operation. Self adaptive software should also include a set of components for each major function, along with descriptions of the components, so that components of systems can be selected and scheduled at runtime, in response to the evaluators. It also requires the ability to impedance match input/output of sequenced components, and the ability to generate some of this code from specifications. In addition, DARPA seek this new basis of adaptation to be applied at runtime, as opposed to development/design time, or as a maintenance activity.

The purpose of the workshop is to help establish a continuing research agenda and research community in the area of self adaptive software. That agenda will be determined by considering the challenges ahead and the tools and techniques which can be applied to those challenges. A partial list of those challenges includes:

understanding how to test and debug systems that change themselves;
achieving confidence in the reliability of systems that change at runtime;
achieving mathematical foundations for the class of self adaptive computations (control theory mathematics is not directly applicable but we have similar needs);
techniques for reasoning qualitatively about self adaptive systems.

DESIRED PAPER TOPICS:

Applications of non-linear control theory and its application to self adaptive software.
Applications of self adaptive software in specific domains.
Design environments and technology for building self adaptive software.
The role of introspection in building self adaptive software.
Self adaptive software as dynamic planning.
Contributions of A.I. technology to self adaptive software.
Role of Self adaptive Software in advancing A.I.

Participation is by invitation only. Invitations will be based on successful review of draft papers. The accepted papers will be published subsequent to the workshop, along with some of the workshop products.

Workshop topics will be chosen based on the accepted papers, and on the partial list of challenges listed above. Those topics will be announced at the time papers are accepted.

Authors should submit an electronic copy of their paper to rladdaga@ai.mit.edu. All papers will be reviewed by the program committee, and authors will be notified of acceptance by 1 January. Submitted papers should be in postscript, PDF or MS Word format. Submitted papers must be no longer than 20 pages. Style files will be provided for the preparation of the final papers.

IMPORTANT DATES

Draft Papers Due: 1 December 2000
Notification of Acceptance: 1 January 2001
Final Papers Due: 1 March 2001

ORGANIZERS

Gábor Péceli, Technical University of Budapest
Robert Laddaga, MIT

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Gábor Péceli, Technical University of Budapest
Paul Robertson, Oxford University
János Sztipanovits, Vanderbilt University
Howie Shrobe, MIT
Robert Laddaga, MIT

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If you have comments or suggestions, email me at rladdaga@ai.mit.edu

Last Updated: 21 September 2000