System Development at Run Time

Models are essential for defining and developing systems that support run-time decision-making and reconfiguration, and for implementing autonomous and adaptive systems for remote, hazardous, and largely unknown external environments. We show that they can also be used as the operational code throughout the development process, including deployment. Our ability to build systems with this property depends crucially on Computational Reflection, and our implementation thereof, an integration infrastructure for complex software-intensive systems called Wrappings. It is inherent in a Wrapping system that all activity (down to a specified level of detail) can be recorded as sequences of events with associated context. The system can consider these event elements as points in a “behavior trajectory” space, and use recent advanced mathematical analysis methods to discover hidden relationships in the environment and system behaviors. These relationships can be used to improve the system models and therefore the corresponding behavior.