A biologically inspired programming model for self-healing systems

ABSTRACT

There is an increasing need for software systems to be able to adapt to changing conditions of resource variability, component malfunction and malicious intrusion. Such self-healing systems can prove extremely useful in situations where continuous service is critical or manual repair is not feasible. Human efforts to engineer self-healing systems have had limited success, but nature has developed extraordinary mechanisms for robustness and self-healing over billions of years. Nature's programs are encoded in DNA and exhibit remarkable density and expressiveness. We argue that the software engineering community can learn a great deal about building systems from the broader concepts surrounding biological cell programs and the strategies they use to robustly accomplish complex tasks such as development, healing and regeneration. We present a cell-based programming model inspired from biology and speculate on biologically inspired strategies for producing robust, scalable and self-healing software systems.

REFERENCES

• 1: Harold Abelson , Don Allen , Daniel Coore , Chris Hanson , George Homsy , Thomas F. Knight, Jr. , Radhika Nagpal , Erik Rauch , Gerald Jay Sussman , Ron Weiss, Amorphous computing, Communications of the ACM, v.43 n.5, p.74-82, May 2000 [doi>10.1145/332833.332842]
• 2: Mary Y. Mazzotta. Nutrition and wound healing. Journal of the American Podiatric Medical Association. Volume 84, Number 9, p. 456-62. September 1994.
• 3: Radhika Nagpal , Gerald Jay Sussman , Harold Abelson, Programmable self-assembly: constructing global shape using biologically-inspired local interactions and origami mathematics, 2001
• 4: John von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. University of Illinois Press, 1966 (Originally published in 1953).
• 5: Helen Pearson, The regeneration gap, Nature Science Update. 22 November 2001.
• 6: Lewis Wolpert, Rosa Beddington, Peter Lawrence, Thomas M. Jessell, Principles of Development, Oxford University Press. 2002.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.0 General

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification
          Subjects: Reliability

  F. Theory of Computation
  F.1 COMPUTATION BY ABSTRACT DEVICES
      F.1.1 Models of Computation

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Languages, Reliability, Security

Keywords:
amorphous computing, biological programming, self-healing systems