Rocco De Nicola: A formal approach to autonomic systems programming: The SCEL Language

The autonomic computing paradigm has been proposed to cope with size, complexity and dynamism of contemporary software-intensive systems. The challenge for language designers is to devise appropriate abstractions and linguistic primitives to deal with the large dimension of systems, and with their need to adapt to the changes of the working environment and to the evolving requirements. We propose a set of programming abstractions that permit to represent behaviours, knowledge and aggregations according to specific policies, and to support programming context-awareness, self-awareness and adaptation. Based on these abstractions, we define SCEL (Software Component Ensemble Language), a kernel language whose solid semantic foundations lay also the basis for formal reasoning on autonomic systems behaviour. To show expressiveness and effectiveness of SCEL's design, we present a Java implementation of the proposed abstractions and show how it can be exploited for programming a robotics scenario that is used as a running example for describing features and potentials of our approach.

Biography

De Nicola is a full professor at IMT Lucca. The research interests of De Nicola concern: the foundations of distributed computing, the formal specification and checking of qualitative and quantitative properties of systems, the protection of distributed systems and computer networks. De Nicola is the author of more than 130 publications in international journals or books with international editors, and has been "invited speaker" at international conferences and schools, and "program chair" and member of program committees of many international conferences. De Nicola figures in the list of Thomson ISI-cited researchers in the world (HiglyCited). He is a member of the Academia Europaea, of Gruppo 2003 and of Working Group 2.2 and 1.9 of IFIP. In 2005 he was appointed "Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic" by the President of the Italian Republic.