Investigation of a teleo-reactive approach for the development of autonomic manager systems

As the demand for more capable and more feature-rich software increases, the complexity in design, implementation and maintenance also increases exponentially. This becomes a problem when the complexity prevents developers from writing, improving, fixing or otherwise maintaining software to meet specified demands whilst still reaching an acceptable level of robustness. When complexity becomes too great, the software becomes impossible to effectively be managed by even large teams of people. One way to address the problem is an Autonomic approach to software development. Autonomic software aims to tackle complexity by allowing the software to manage itself, thus reducing the need for human intervention and allowing it to reach a maintainable state. Many techniques have been investigated for development of autonomic systems including policy-based designs, utility-functions and advanced architectures. A unique approach to the problem is the teleo-reactive programming paradigm. This paradigm offers a robust and simple structure on which to develop systems. It allows the developer the freedom to express their intentions in a logical manner whilst the increased robustness reduces the maintenance cost. Teleo-Reactive programming is an established solution to low-level agent based problems such as robot navigation and obstacle avoidance, but this technique shows behaviour which is consistent with higher-level autonomic solutions. This project therefore investigates the extent of the applicability of teleo-reactive programming as an autonomic solution. Can the technique be adapted to allow a more ideal ‘fitness for purpose’ for autonomics whilst causing minimal changes to the tried and tested original structure and meaning? Does the technique introduce any additional problems and can these be addressed with improvements to the teleo-reactive framework? Teleo-Reactive programming is an interesting approach to autonomic computing because in a Teleo-Reactive program, its state is not predetermined at any moment in time and is based on a priority system where rules execute based on the current environmental context (i.e. not in any strict procedural way) whilst still aiming at the intended goal. This method has been shown to be very robust and exhibits some of the qualities of autonomic software.