Chemical specification of autonomic systems

Autonomic computing provides a vision of information systems allowing self-management of many predefined properties. Such systems take care of their own behavior and of their interactions with other components without any external intervention. One of the major challenges concerns the expression of properties and constraints of autonomic systems. We believe that the chemical programming paradigm (represented here by the Gamma formalism) is well-suited to the specification of autonomic systems. In Gamma, computation is described in terms of chemical reactions (rewrite rules) in solutions (multisets of elements). It captures the intuition of a collection of cooperative components which evolve freely according to some predefined constraints. In this paper, after a short presentation of a higher-order version of the Gamma formalism, it is shown through the example of a mailing system, how the major properties expected from an autonomic system can be easily expressed as a collection of chemical reactions.