<%@LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%> Self Controlling Software - Mission
 
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Mission

Self-Controlling Software changes its behavior in response to external feedback it receives during operation. The feedback can come from human users or external world that the software system operates in. Changes to behavior can be implemented in a number of ways - from adjusting some parameters to changing the structure.

We are pursuing a control theory based approach to self-controlling software. Central to our approach is the assumption that software is treated as a plant. This is similar to other control applications where a plant is identified first and then controllers are added at design time. We view the plant as a dynamical system with dynamics related to both the external environment and the computing system.

Control theory has developed a number of concepts that are relevant to self-controlling software, like the concepts of stability, controllability, observability and other.

We first described the control theory based approach to self-controlling software in 1997 [EracarKokar97]. We presented a more complete description of this approach in IEEE Intelligent Systems [KokarBaclawskiEracar99] and published some results of experiments in the Journal of Systems and Software [EracarKokar2000]. For a more complete list of our publications click here.