Designing Resilient Autonomous Systems with the Reflex Pattern

Autonomous systems face significant challenges due to fluctuating resources and unstable environments, where traditional redundancy strategies for resilience can be inefficient. We present the Reflex pattern, inspired by biological reflexes, promoting system resilience by dynamically adapting to changing resource conditions. By switching between complex and resource-efficient algorithms based on availability, the pattern optimizes efficient resource utilization without extensive redundancy, ensuring essential functionalities remain operational under constraints. To facilitate adoption, we introduce ReflexLang, a domain-specific language (DSL) enabling automated code generation for reflex-pattern-based systems. We validate the pattern's effectiveness in a drone image processing scenario, demonstrating its potential to enhance operational integrity and resilience.