Constructing Autonomous Systems: Major Development Phases

Abstract—Developing autonomous systems requires adaptable and context aware techniques. The approach described here decomposes a complex system into service components – func-tionally simple building blocks enriched with local knowledge attributes. The internal components ’ knowledge is used to dynam-ically construct ensembles of service components. Thus, ensembles capture collective behavior by grouping service components in many-to-many manner, according to their communication and operational/functional requirements. To achieve such high level of dynamic behavior a complete development life cycle for ensemble based systems has been defined and supported by rigorous analyses and modeling methods, linguistic constructs and software tools. We focus here on the analysis, modeling, programming and deployment phases of the autonomous systems development life cycle. A strong pragmatic orientation of the approach is illustrated by two different application scenarios. The main result of this work is an integrated view on developing autonomous systems in diverse application domains. Keywords-autonomous systems, component-based systems, context-aware systems I