AWARE: Adaptive Software Monitoring and Dynamic Reconfiguration for Critical Infrastructure Protection

The ARO-supported AWARE project addressed the design and performance of adaptive software technologies for highly trusted software systems. A dynamically adaptive system DAS monitors itself and its execution environment at run time. This monitoring enables a DAS not only to detect conditions warranting a reconfiguration, but also to determine when and how to safely reconfigure itself in order to deliver acceptable behavior before, during, and after adaptation. Using this technology, existing systems can be hardened against adverse conditions and cyber-attacks that were unforeseen at the time of deployment. The project produced several important advances in several aspects of self-adaptive systems, including novel methods for modeling dynamically adaptive software 2 adaptive monitoring software through code generation and verification, both at development time and run time 3 real-time decision-making algorithms that enable the system to respond effectively to changing conditions and threats and 4 application of evolutionary computation to software assurance, self-organizing protocols for distributed systems, and the design of autonomous robots.