Dusko Pavlovic Kestrel Institute
As any other industry, software production has been advancing by automating large parts of its process. The machine code has been automatically compiled from high level programs for some forty years. In maintenance, however, the adaptation of the system to the changed environments or requirements is still executed and supervised by the engineers. The need is present and the means available for automated runtime adaptation. To accomplish this goal, integrated advances must be made in two main areas: software semantics and program change or adaptation. The need arises for an interdisciplinary approach, combining the foundational structures from game semantics with the engineering methods for developing self-adaptive software. This project will extend and bring closer together our past individual and collaborative efforts in: game semantics of programming languages (Oxford); specification-carrying software (Kestrel); and selfadaptive architectures (MIT). In traditional semantics computations are usually viewed as sequences of actions of the System. The properties of interest (safety, liveness, fairness) are then presented as predicates over such sequences. The essence of game semantics is to make explicit the actions of the Environment as well as the System. The interaction of the two is then construed as a game: the Environment chooses the inputs, and the System must respond with the correct outputs. A program is then a strategy for the System, prescribing a response to each move of the Environment.
