Title
Evolving robust networks for systems-of-systems
Abstract
Software systems that rely on ad-hoc networks are becoming increasingly complex and increasingly prevalent. Some of these systems provide vital functionality to military operations, emergency services and disaster relief; such systems may have significant impact on the safety of people involved in those operations. It is therefore important that those networks support critical software requirements, including those for latency of packet transfer. If a network ceases to meet the software's requirements (e.g. due to a link failure) then engineers must be able to understand it well enough to reconfigure the network and restore it to a requirement-satisfying state. Given a complex network, it is difficult for a human to do this under time pressure. In this paper we present a search-based tool which takes a network defined using the Network Description Language (NDL), annotated with a set of network-hosted applications and a set of latency requirements between each. We then evolve variants of the network configuration which meet the requirements and are robust to single link failures. We use network calculus tools to get a fast, conservative evaluation of whether a given network meets its requirements. We demonstrate that this approach is viable, designs networks much faster than a human engineer could, and is superior to a random generate-and-test approach.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1007/978-3-642-33119-0_4
SSBSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
software system,network configuration,designs network,robust network,human engineer,critical software requirement,network calculus tool,ad-hoc network,link failure,latency requirement,complex network,systems of systems,genetic algorithms
Systems engineering,Computer science,System of systems,Network simulation,Software system,Artificial intelligence,Complex network,Network calculus,Distributed computing,Intelligent computer network,Software requirements,Network packet,Machine learning
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
12
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jonathan M. Aitken1266.92
Robert Alexander2548.22
Tim P. Kelly324234.09
Simon Poulding4717.64