Self-aware, self-adaptive and self-expressive autonomic components, running within environments which are called “ensembles”, have been proposed to handle open-ended, highly parallel, massively distributed systems that can span millions of nodes with complex interactions and behaviours. However, these complex systems are currently difficult to develop, deploy, and manage.

The goal of the ASCENS project is to build ensembles in a way that combines the maturity and wide applicability of traditional software engineering approaches with the assurance about functional and non-functional properties provided by formal methods and the flexibility, low management overhead, and optimal utilization of resources promised by autonomic, adaptive, self-aware systems.