A Software Pattern for Autonomic Object Behavior

John W. Gilbert
Objective Software
1985 W. Henderson Rd., Suite 525
Columbus, Ohio  43220
phone: 614-457-4487
fax: 614-459-7310
email: gilbert@acm.org

Abstract:

Living beings exhibit behavior in a continous concurrent manner. For example
animals and humans have heartbeats and respiration. This is referred to as
autonomic behavior. Some machines also operate in this manner. For example
process control systems continuously monitor a manufacturing process in
real-time and make corrections to the process as required. Software objects
often are considered to be inherently autonomous and concurrent, but due the
sequential nature of ordinary computers this style of computation is often
absent in the software implementation. This paper describes a software
pattern for emulating this autonomic behavior which can be profitably used
in a variety of systems: maunfacturing, medical monitoring, and safety
management.