Stochastically timed predicate-based communication primitives for autonomic computing
This work addresses programming simplification for autonomous and adaptive systems, but it is incremental as it extends an existing language with stochastic timing.
The authors tackled the challenge of designing stochastically timed predicate-based communication primitives for autonomic computing, resulting in a formal semantics definition and a preliminary performance analysis of a bike sharing system model.
Predicate-based communication allows components of a system to send messages and requests to ensembles of components that are determined at execution time through the evaluation of a predicate, in a multicast fashion. Predicate-based communication can greatly simplify the programming of autonomous and adaptive systems. We present a stochastically timed extension of the Software Component Ensemble Language (SCEL) that was introduced in previous work. Such an extension raises a number of non-trivial design and formal semantics issues with different options as possible solutions at different levels of abstraction. We discuss four of these options, of which two in more detail. We provide a formal semantics definition and an illustration of the use of the language modeling a bike sharing system, together with some preliminary analysis of the system performance.