Self-Aware and Self-Expressive Systems

Engineering self-awareness and self-expression in computing systems is an emerging trend in design and operation of modern computing systems, which have increasingly complex, heterogeneous structures and growing requirements. Embedded avionics systems could make particularly good use of self-awareness and self-expression. These concepts offer flexibility to avionic subsystems, allowing them to adapt and deal with the lack of knowledge, changes and unpredictability of their deployment environments, and also to work around or even overcome their functional and performance limitations due to their strict weight, power, size and density constraints. Many efforts have been made previously to integrate selfawareness in computing systems. Some studies, such as that by Cox, consider self-awareness as a part of metacognition.1 Other studies, such as that of Agarwal, focus on self-awareness in computing systems as an ability of a system to explicitly consider knowledge about itself.2 As for the concept of self-expression, it has barely been considered in the engineering and computer science context. Given the disparate and occasionally overly rigid use of the term ‘self-awareness’ in the literature and the lack of previous treatment of the idea of self-expression in the computing and engineering literature, we developed a more general working definition for self-aware and self-expressive computing systems inspired by biology. Based upon that working definition and with the aim of guiding the design of self-aware and self-expressive systems, we developed a reference architectural framewok which structures their requirements.3 Then we implemented a modelling and simulation environment which enables the development of virtual simulators to systematically model, simulate and study the behaviour and performance of particular self-aware and self-expressive systems.4 This environment is is new and there is no such environment in previous work. We intend for it to fill the gap between research at the conceptional Figure 1. Reference architecture for a single self-aware and selfexpressive node.