Control and Discovery of Reactive System Environments

KEEGAN, MAUREEN; BRABERMAN VICTOR; DIPPOLITO R. NICOLAS; PITERMAN NIR; UCHITEL SEBASTIAN

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

IEEE COMPUTER SOC

Lugar: Los Alamitos, CA, USA; Año: 2020

0098-5589

An important ability of self-adaptive systems is to be able to autonomously understand the environment in which they operate and use this knowledge to control the environment in such a way that system goals are achieved. Two phase solutions that require a full discovery of environment behaviour before computing a strategy that can guarantee the goals or report the non-existence of such a strategy (i.e., unrealisability) are impractical as the environment may exhibit adversarial behaviour to avoid full exploration. In this paper we formalise the behaviour control and discovery problem for reactive system environments as one in which a strategy must be produced that will, for any environment, guarantee that unrealisablity will be correctly concluded or system goals will be achieved by controlling the environment. We then present a solution to the behaviour control and discovery problem restricted to GR(1) goals that uses modal transition systems (MTS) to represent partial knowledge of environment behaviour, and that relies MTS controller synthesis to make each exploration decisions in such a way that it either contributes more knowledge about the environment?s behaviour or contributes to achieving the system goals.