Pattern for Autonomic Object Behavior

Living beings exhibit behavior in a continous concurrent manner. For example animals and humans have heartbeats and respiration. This is referred to as autonomic behavior. Some machines also operate in this manner. For example process control systems continuously monitor a manufacturing process in real-time and make corrections to the process as required. Software objects often are considered to be inherently autonomous and concurrent, but due the sequential nature of ordinary computers this style of computation is often absent in the software implementation. This paper describes a software pattern for emulating this autonomic behavior which can be profitably used in a variety of systems: maunfacturing, medical monitoring, and safety management.