Building reconfiguration primitives into the law of a system

Abstract

Given a certain class C of reconfigurations, deemed to be potentially important for a given system, we define a reconfiguration suite S/sub c/ to be a set of primitive operations that satisfy the following conditions: any reconfiguration in C can be carried out by a sequence of primitives from S/sub c/. The correctness of S/sub c/ should be independent of the functionality of the system, and invariant of its reconfigurations (for a given set of possible configurations of the system at hand). We describe a mechanism for implementing such reconfiguration suites, for a system that operates under law-governed interaction (LGI), currently supported by an experimental toolkit called Moses. LGI is a mode of interaction between the members of a given group (or system) of agents, which is governed by an explicit and strictly enforced set of rules, called the law of this group. The existence of such a law under LGI provides us with an architectural model of the system, which can be made to include the definition of reconfiguration suites.