ASCENS - Autonomic Service-Component Ensembles

Future software-intensive systems, such as sensor networks, power grids, satellite and robot swarms, will generally exhibit a number of characteristic features: - Massive numbers of nodes, nodes with complex behavior, or complex interactions between nodes. - Operation in open and non-deterministic environments with variable network topology. - Need for adaptation, e.g., to changing environments and requirements.We call this future generation of software-intensive systems ensembles. The potentially huge impact – both positive and negative - of ensembles means that we need to understand ways to reliably and predictably model, design, and program them. Although there is a lot of research in this area, so far no theoretically well-founded technique for building ensembles exists. The goal of the ASCENS project is to develop such a method and to demonstrate its feasibility in three important application domains: robot swarms, cloud computing and e-mobility.