Agile Objects
J. W. S. Liu,* L. Zhang
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Subcontract

This project focuses on mechanisms that enable location and interface elusiveness to enhance the survivability of critical information systems. These mechanisms complement intrusion/attack detection mechanisms and policies to provide a complete solution. An emphasis is agile open systems for hard and soft real-time applications.

Defect-Tolerant System Integration and Evolution
L. Sha,* J. Lopes, C. Parrott, K. Wehner
U.S. Office of Naval Research, Sha 2063

Large software systems are developed by integrating software components. Unfortunately, many complex software components often contain defects. On the other hand, we do have technology to develop modest size software components with a high degree of confidence, e.g., flight control software. Our research focuses on algorithms and architectures that can leverage simple high assurance components to (1) ensure the integrity of large distributed real-time systems in spite of faults in complex software components, (2) support reliable upgrade of and online tuning of deployed systems, and (3) detect and resist cyber attacks.

EPIQ: End-to-End Quality of Service and Resource Management
J. W. S. Liu,* K. Nahrstedt,* Z. Deng, B. Li, M. K. Gardner, M. Jonnalagadda, M. Seri, M. Shankar, C. S. Shih, M. Tian, A. K. Viswanathan, D. Xu, Z. Y. W. Zhang
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, F30602-97-2-0121

The EPIQ project is developing an end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and resource management framework for real-time, multimedia and high-performance applications. EPIQ multidimensional QoS management mechanisms will be application-domain independent but will permit integration with application-specific mechanisms and give user control in adaptation, graceful degradation, and recovery. QoS management will be supported by an open run-time environment that can provide end-to-end real-time performance guarantees and deliver predictable, high-performance communication.

Linguistic Support for Real-Time Programming
G. A. Agha*
University of Illinois

The current generation of concurrent programming languages provides inadequate support for real-time computation. The goal of this project is to simplify real-time programming by separating the specification of timing constraints on a group of actors from their logical behavior. Such a separation will support incremental modification of both the timing constraints and the actor representations. Real-time constraints in our approach are represented declaratively and constrain the scheduling of groups of actors.

Real-Time Infrastructure for Context Dependent Networked Agents
L. Sha,* X. He, X. Liu, M. Tian
Electric Power Research Institute

The control of the next generation of power generation and distribution systems will utilize networked control agents whose actions will be context dependent. This work will provide a distributed real-time computing infrastructure for agent-based control. Our research focuses on how to (1) provide real-time, coherent views to distributed control agents, (2) support the fault tolerant, dynamic replacement of control agents, and (3) check to determine if an agent is compromised by a computer virus.