Self-Aware Planner Interface and Engine (SAPIEN)

Self-aware systems have three essential properties: they build empirical models of their own performance; they use those models to inform optimal plans of action; and they continually refine their models and plans based on the outcomes of their actions. Although engineers routinely build some degree of intelligence into the systems they design, an explanatory gap inevitably grows between what engineers intuitively know and what they can feasibly express—a gap that that must be filled in order to produce intelligently optimized, self-aware systems. The SAPIEN (Self-Aware Planner Interface and Engine) system is a software toolkit that drastically lowers the barriers to building self-aware software and hardware systems. SAPIEN enables any system that monitors its own performance to improve that performance over time by using automatic data-driven performance modeling combined with optimization. The Phase I effort completed by Archinoetics resulted in a Java toolset for building self-aware and self-optimizing computing systems that is highly scalable and totally automatic. Proposed Phase II work builds off of this prototype software application, increasing the usability, applicability, and effectiveness of the SAPIEN application for system designers.