Towards adaptive web agents

There is an increasingly large demand for software systems which are able to operate effectively in dynamic environments. In such environments, automated software engineering is extremely valuable since a system needs to evolve in order to respond to changing requirements. One way for software to evolve is for it to reflect upon a model of its own design. A key challenge in reflective evolution is credit assignment: given a model representing the design elements of a complex system, how might that system localize, identify and prioritize prospective candidates for potential modification. We describe a model-based credit assignment mechanism. We also report on an experiment on evolving the design of Mosaic 2.4, an early network browser.