Towards Specifying Reactive Autonomic Systems with a Categorical Approach: A Case Study

Software complexity is the main obstacle to further progress in the IT industry. One solution is the autonomic system with self-* properties. Formal methods are proven approaches to ensuring the correct operation of complex interacting systems. However, the current formal methods do not adequately address the problem of verifying two of the most important features of auto-nomic systems, namely emergent behavior and evolving behavior. Category Theory (CT) has recently been proposed as a formal framework to provide a structure for isolating the management of evolving specifications and the analysis of changes. We propose a formal framework based on CT in this paper to specify reactive autonomic systems. Our approach is illustrated with a NASA case study.

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