Selvin George
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.
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Digital Library
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- Radhika Nagpal, Programmable Self-Assembly: Constructing Global Shape using Biologically-inspired Local Interactions and Origami Mathematics, PhD Thesis, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, June 2001.]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- John von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. University of Illinois Press, 1966 (Originally published in 1953).]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- Helen Pearson, The regeneration gap, Nature Science Update. 22 November 2001.]]Google Scholar
- Lewis Wolpert, Rosa Beddington, Peter Lawrence, Thomas M. Jessell, Principles of Development, Oxford University Press. 2002.]]Google Scholar
Index Terms
- A biologically inspired programming model for self-healing systems
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