Towards a Self-Forensics Property in the ASSL Toolset

This preliminary conceptual work discusses a notion of self-forensics as an autonomic property to augment the Autonomic System Specification Language (ASSL) framework of formal specification tools for autonomic systems. The core of the proposed methodology leverages existing designs, theoretical results, and implementing systems to enable rapid completion of and validation of the experiments and their the results initiated in this work. Specifically, we leverage the ASSL toolkit to add the self-forensics autonomic property (SFAP) to enable generation of the Java-based Object-Oriented Intensional Programming (JOOIP) language code laced with traces of Forensic Lucid to encode contextual forensic evidence and other expressions

Bulgarian sport policy 1945-1989: A strategic relation perspective

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games have stimulated discussions about the success of different sport systems and the Chinese model in particular. Revisiting explanations of sport in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe during the Cold War seems timely, as the current Chinese model of sport was largely designed after the Soviet example established in this period. This paper examines Bulgarian sport policy between 1945 and 1989. It employs a Strategic Relation approach (Jessop, 1990) to analyse sport policy making as a strategic relation closely linked to the dominant state project of building a new stateness. It goes beyond ideological interpretations and argues that the state represents a strategic terrain where these relations have to be established in struggles, the outcomes of which are always uncertain. Furthermore, past and present struggles and their outcomes create various socio-political environments that presuppose the forms of state selectivity and intervention in sport. The process of constructing sport policy was influenced by two main categories of strategic relations: intra-state, including political, organisational and personal relations between the Party, state apparatus and various sport and non-sport organisations and their managers, and transnational, concerning ideological, political, economic and organisational relations with both communist and western countries and international sport organisations

Integration and promotion of autonomy with the ARE framework

The integration and promotion of autonomy in software-intensive systems is an extremely challenging task. Among the many challenges the engineers must overcome are those related to the elicitation and expression of autonomy requirements. Striving to solve this problem, Lero the Irish Software Engineering Research Center has developed an Autonomy Requirements Engineering (ARE) approach within the mandate of a joint project with ESA, the European Space Agency. The approach is intended to help system engineers tackle the integration and promotion of autonomy in software-intensive systems, e.g., space-exploration robots. To handle autonomy requirements, ARE provides a requirements engineering baseline where despite their principle differences in application domain and functionality all autonomous and self-adaptive systems are expected to extend upstream the regular software-intensive systems with special self-managing objectives (self-* objectives). Basically, the self-* objectives provide the system’s ability to automatically discover, diagnose, and cope with various problems. ARE emphasizes this ability as being driven by the system’s degree of autonomicity, quality and quantity of knowledge, awareness and monitoring capabilities, and quality attributes such as adaptability, dynamicity, robustness, resilience, and mobility. As part of its successful validation, ARE was applied to capture the autonomy requirements for the ESA’s BepiColombo unmanned space exploration mission

Autonomic Computing Software for Autonomous Space Vehicles

Abstract. Current space missions increasingly demand more autonomy in con-trol architectures for Unmanned Space Vehicles (USVs), so unmanned long-term missions can be afforded. Continuous assurance of effective adaptation to unpredictable internal and external changes, along with efficient management of resources is essential for such requirements. One of the attractive solutions is that inspired by the physiology of living systems, where self-regulation helps to achieve continuous adaptation to the environment by changing internal condi-tions. The physiological functions are performed by nervous system reflexes that are the foundations for self-regulatory mechanisms such as homeostasis. Building artificial self-regulation similar to biological ones into USVs makes them highly-viable and ultra-stable in order to support very long missions. This paper presents aspects of how to endow USVs with Artificial Nervous Reflexes (ANRs) by means of applying physiological principles of self-regulation to the USV's control architecture, so resilience and persistence can be supported. A case study of a composite orbiter is presented. The studied ANRs are needed to guarantee the self-regulation of response time (latency), operation temperature (thermoregulation), and power consumption (energy balance). Results from a cross-checked analysis of the above self-regulation mechanisms are also pre-sented.

Self-forensics through case studies of small-to-medium software systems.

The notion and definition of self-forensics was introduced by Mokhov to encompass software and hardware capabilities for autonomic and other systems to record their own states, events, and others encoded in a forensic form suitable for (potentially automated) forensic analysis, evidence modeling and specification, and event reconstruction for various system components. For self-forensics, “self-dissection” is possible for analysis using a standard language and decision making if the system includes such a self-forensic subsystem. The self-forensic evidence is encoded in a cyberforensic investigation case and event reconstruction language, Forensic Lucid. The encoding of the stories depicted by the evidence comprise a context as a first-class value of a Forensic Lucid “program”, after which an investigator models the case describing relationships between various events and pieces of information. It is important to get the context right for the case to have a meaning and the proper meaning computation, so we perform case studies of some small-to-medium, distributed and not, primarily academic open-source software systems. In this work, for the purpose of implementation of the small self-forensic modules for the data structures and event flow, we specify the requirements of what the context should be for those systems. The systems share in common the base programming language – Java, so our self-forensic logging of the Java data structures and events as Forensic Lucid context specification expressions is laid out ready for an investigator to examine and model the case

Self-optimization property in autonomic specification of distributed MARF with ASSL

In this work, we venture out to develop self-optimization features in the Distributed Modular Audio Recognition Framework (DMARF). Here, we use the Autonomic System Speci cation Language (ASSL) to specify a self-optimization policy and generate the code for the same. This completes the rst iteration of the autonomic speci cation layer for DMARF and enables re-engineered autonomic DMARF system, which also includes self-healing and self-protection, both developed earlier