Serene'13

Preliminary Contributions

Towards Auto-Resilience

Vincenzo De Florio, PATS research group

http://win.uantwerpen.be/~vincenz/

What is it all about?

• A number of questions; some reflections;

some ideas and conjectures

• Questions:

• What is resilience?

• What makes an individual or collective essence

resilient?

• How can we use this knowledge to design

resilient essences?

• Autonomic management of resilience

4 October 2013 SERENE 2013

Q1: What is resilience?

• Resilience = ability to retain one’s identity

• From Aristotle’s concept of entelechy

• Being-at-work staying-the-same [Sachs]

• Being-at-work: adapt to changing

circumstances

• Staying-the-same: without compromising

one’s “definition” –

one’s essence


Q2: What makes an essence resilient?

• Several different abilities co-existing within a

same essence

• Optimal co-existence = tough design problem!

• Design trade-offs are necessary due to physical

or practical limitations

• Many examples in nature [Nilsson]

• Three major abilities:

perception, apperception, entelechy


Resilience prerequisites: perception

• Ability to timely register the state of some

portion of the context

• Sub-divided into three layers:

sensors, quale, memory


Perception :: sensors

• Primary interface with physical world

• Reflect a subset of the world’s “raw facts”

• Problems:

• Proper subset (incomplete view) • « Facile credo plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum

universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit ? Et

gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera?» T. Burnet

• Imperfect reflection

• External dependences (resource depletion…)

• Aging


Perception :: quale

• C = computer world, U = physical world

• C-representations of U raw facts

• A morphism qualia : U C

• Important aspects w.r.t. resilience:

• Qualia manifestation latency

• Time b/w U event e occurs and qualia(e) appears in C

• Reflective throughput

• Amount of raw facts that may be reliably encoded as

quale per time unit


Perception :: memory

• Quale persistence layer

• Storage and retrieval of quale

• «Apri la mente a quel ch'io ti paleso

e fermalvi entro; ché non fa scïenza,

sanza lo ritenere, avere inteso»

(Dante, Paradiso, V, 40-42)

• Important aspects w.r.t. resilience:

• Qualia access time

• How quickly the “control layer” may access stored quale


http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Divina_Commedia/Paradiso/Canto_V



Powers of representation

• A measure of the quality of perception

[Leibniz]

• A metric to compare the perception of

essences

4 October 2013

PoR(∞)

PoR(a) PoR(b)

• PoR(a) < PoR(∞)

• PoR(b) < PoR(∞)

• PoR(a) ≠ PoR(b)

SERENE 2013


• Note: PoR are dynamic systems

• PoR: metrics to compare essences and

ambients

4 October 2013

PoR(a) PoR(b)

• E.g. say a is deployed in b

• Picture says:

• a perceives only a

subset of b’s context

• a perceives changes

that won’t occur in b

SERENE 2013


• Predicate amb(x) = “x is an ambient”

• Predicate esn(x) = “x is an essence”

4 October 2013

PoR(a)

PoR(b) • esn(a) ᴧ esn(b)

PoR(a) < PoR(b)

• amb(a) ᴧ esn(b)

• b perceives all of a’s context

• b is designed to perceive

changes that won’t occur in a

SERENE 2013


4 October 2013

PoR(a)

PoR(b)

• esn(a) ᴧ amb(b)

• a perceives a subset of

b’s context : some changes

in b won’t be perceived by a

SERENE 2013

Apperception

• Apperception defines how the reflected quale

are accrued, correlated with past perception,

and used to create dynamic models of the

“self” and of the “world” (deployment ambient)

• “The most merciful thing in the world, I think,

is the inability of the human mind to correlate

all its contents”

[H.P.Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu]


Apperception

• Behaviour may be used to rank an essence’s

apperception [re: Rosenblueth; Boulding]

• Apperception is a trait characterising

• Teleological behaviour essences

• 0-order predictive behaviour essences

• N-order predictive behaviour essences

• The above order may be used to define an

apperception metric to compare essences

with one another (in what follows: ord(e))


Entelechism

• The quality and characteristics of the

mechanisms responsible for planning and

controlling the robust emergence of resilience

• In a resilient MAPE-K loop essence, the

Planner

• Planner is an essence in itself; thus its

apperception may be ranked


Entelechism :: Meta-apperception

• Apperception of an essence’s Planning

essence

• Say a is an essence and a.p is its planning

essence; in general

ord(a) ≠ ord(a.p)

• E.g. a may be 1-order predictive while

a.p may be 0-order (teleological)

[De Florio, ‘13]


Entelechism :: Multiplicity and

organisation of Planners

• Second important factor towards resilience:

• presence of a single or multiple concurrent

Planners

• Latter case:

- individual vs. social nature of the interactions

between Planners

- organisation of control among the Planners


Entelechism :: Multiplicity of

Planners

• Individual vs social context: choices are made

in isolation or otherwise

• E.g. Bacillus subtilis

• when subjected to a stressful environment B.subtilis

use quorum sensing and choose between cooperative

and selfish strategies depending on an estimation of

the choices made by fellows


Entelechism :: Organisation of

Planners

• The way collective resilient planning

is carried out

• Centralised, hierarchical, heterarchical,

distributed organisation, …

• Latter case: bionic organisations, holarchies,

and fractal organisations

• a hierarchical composition of autonomous

planners


Q3: How can we use resilience

classes to design resilient essences?

• Conjecture:

- decomposing resilience into sub-properties;

- classifying essences and ambients

accordingly;

makes it easier:

• to reason about essence-ambient fits;

• to resiliently self-adapt an essence w.r.t. a

reference ambient

Auto-resilience


Example: resilience handshake

• An admission control mechanism constraining

the deployment of an essence in a target

ambient

• Aim: Allowing an essence’s resilience figures

to be matched with the expected minimal

resilience requirements of a deployment

ambient

• “Resilience contract” to be matched with an

“environment policy”



• Classic scenario: miner and canary

• Two very different essences each

characterized by peculiar resilience figures

• At first sight, miner is a superior essence

• Extended perception, apperception, entelechism

• But miner is deployed in an unfavourable

ambient (mine)

• PoR(Miner) < PoR(Mine)

• carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane…



• Classic solution: the miner brings along a

canary

• Now PoR(miner+canary) > PoR(miner)

• “+” here implies constant monitoring

• If perception of toxic gases

is here,

Miner+canary will be able

to react


PoR(Mine)

PoR(M+c)

PoR(M)

Conclusions

• Nature made us, nature shows us the way

• Symbiosis, mutualistic relationships, biological

collaborative interactions are nature’s way to

augment our individual features

• Only through this we can match changing

environments before the changes make us

extinct


Conclusions

• Computer systems have a double option:

1. They can evolve themselves towards

resilience – much faster than physical

essences

2. They can use mutualistic approaches to give

raise to complex collective resilient systems

• Auto-resilience = ability to manage

autonomously the complex trade-offs

necessary to manage 1. and 2.


Conclusions

• Future work: try and define design principles

for auto-resilience

• Dynamic composition of essences and

planners via Transformer [GD12]

• Collective resilience strategies via Fractal

Social Organizations and their social overlay

networks [DF12, DF13a, DF13b]


Thank you very much

for your attention

[email protected]


References

• Sachs, J.: Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study. Rutgers (1995)

• Nilsson, T.: How neural branching solved an information bottleneck opening the

way to smart life. In: Proc. of the 10th Int.l Conf. on Cognitive and Neural

Systems, Boston Univ., MA (2008)

• Strickland, L.H.: The shorter Leibniz texts: a collection of new translations

• Rosenblueth, A., Wiener, N., Bigelow, J.: Behavior, purpose and teleology.

Philosophy of Science 10(1) (1943) 18–24

• Boulding, K.: General systems theory—the skeleton of science. Management

Science 2(3) (1956)

• De Florio, V.: On the constituent attributes of software and organizational

resilience. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 38(2) (2013) [DF13a]

• De Florio, V. et al.: Models and Concepts for Socio-technical Complex Systems:

Towards Fractal Social Organizations, to appear in Systems Research and

Behavioral Science (2012) [DF12]

• De Florio, V.: Fractal Social Organizations on YouTube [DF13b]


http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9P2Zf36MoxEEKA8WTtk3oQ

29 August 2011

Serene'13

Education

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