The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has kicked off a four-year initiative to determine the tools and processes needed to design software that does not need reprogramming for up to 100 years.

According to the agency, the program BRASS, short for Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems, seeks to identify the areas that would require foundational changes in computations and algorithms for instant adoption to new environments.

“Failure to respond to these changes can result in technically inferior and potentially vulnerable systems,” Suresh Jagannathan, DARPA program manager, said Wednesday.

“Equally concerning, the lack of automated upgrade mechanisms to restructure and transform applications leads to high software maintenance costs and premature obsolescence of otherwise functionally sound software.”

DARPA published Tuesday a broad agency announcement on the FedBizOpps website soliciting research proposals on BRASS with a May 22 response date.

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