Collective Adaptive System SynThesIs using Non-zero-sum Games

CASSTING will develop a novel approach for analysing and designing collective adaptive systems in their totality, by setting up a game theoretic framework. Here components are viewed as players, their behaviour is captured by strategies, system runs are plays, and specications are winning conditions.
The design of collective adaptive systems, as they occur, for example, in home automation, health care, and many scenarios of mobile communication, raises fundamental challenges: These systems are distributed, with heterogeneous components interacting continuously among each other and with their environments, components may work collaboratively or as adversaries, they have to adapt over time, they are dynamic in the sense that components can come into existence or vanish, and their specication usually involves multi-dimensional quantitative objectives. Available methods (such as model-based verication and quantitative model-checking) only address selected aspects of collective adaptive systems.