Dynamic software aims at eliminating updates by responding to environment

DARPA’s Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems (BRASS) program aims to take a new approach to software development, aiming for programs that can dynamically adjust to the resources they use and the environment they operate in. DARPA said it expects the program to produce “significant improvements in software resilience, reliability and maintainability.”

DARPA notes that software has a short and unpredictable shelf life compared with other engineering tools, leading to time-consuming and potentially costly upgrades, particularly as software becomes more complex.

For the US military, having access to well-functioning software systems and underlying content is critical to national security, but updates can be as problematic to the America’s armed forces as they are in the civilian world due to the time and expense that they can incur.

“Technology inevitably evolves, but very often corresponding changes in libraries, data formats, protocols, input characteristics and models of components in a software ecosystem undermine the behaviour of applications,” said Suresh Jagannathan, DARPA program manager. “The inability to seamlessly adapt to new operating conditions undermines productivity, hampers the development of cyber-secure infrastructure and raises the long-term risk that access to important digital content will be lost as the software that generates and interprets content becomes out-dated.”