ORCHID: Harnessing Digital Evolution to Design High-Assurance Adaptive Systems

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

Collaborators: Prof. Betty Cheng (PI), Prof. Phil McKinley, Prof. Charles Ofria [all from Computer Science and Engineering]

A robust cyber-infrastructure must be able to monitor the environment and its own behavior, adapt to changing conditions, and protect itself from component failures. The hallmark of the Orchid project is to introduce the fundamental biological principle, evolution, into the development process for adaptive real-world software systems. The project uses and extends the Avida digital evolution software platform to address three primary tasks:

•  Exploiting the automatic generation of software models and search capacity of digital evolution to enable the developer to identify viable system configurations;
• Generating novel strategies to adapt from one system behavior to another in response to changing environmental conditions; and
• Providing assurance for adaptive systems by revealing latent properties within a given configuration in order to distinguish generated configurations and remove unwanted behavior.

A prototype system will be developed and used to conduct an experimental case study in the design of self-adaptive aquatic mobile sensor networks for homeland security and environmental monitoring. The aquatic sensor network consists of swarms of robotic fish with onboard control, navigation, communication, and sensing modules. In addition, an instructional system, Avida-EDAS, will be developed to enable students to evolve models of adaptive software, conduct experiments to assess the impact of adverse environmental conditions, and observe the effects of different adaptation strategies on system execution.