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Models for the Consistent Interaction of Adaptations in Self-Adaptive Systems

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Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems III. Assurances

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9640))

Abstract

Self-adaptive systems enable the run-time modification, or dynamic adaptation, of a software system in order to offer the most appropriate behavior of the system according to its context of execution and the situations of its surrounding environment. Depending on the situations currently at hand, multiple and varied adaptations may affect the original behavior of a software system simultaneously. This may lead to accidental behavioral inconsistencies if not all possible interactions with other adaptations were anticipated. The behavioral inconsistencies problem becomes even more acute if adaptations are unknown beforehand, for example, when new adaptations are incorporated to the system on the fly. Self-adaptive systems must therefore provide a means to arbitrate interactions between adaptions at run time, to ensure that there will be no inconsistencies in the system’s behavior as adaptations are dynamically composed into or withdrawn from the system. This chapter presents existing approaches that allow the development of self-adaptive systems and management of the behavioral inconsistencies that may appear due to the interaction of adaptations at run time. The approaches are classified into four categories: formal, architectural modeling, rule-based, and transition system approaches. Each of these approaches is evaluated with respect to the assurances they provide for the run-time consistency of the system, in the light of dynamic behavior adaptations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Graph transformation models, like AGG, can also be used as engines for rule-based approaches.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported, in part, by Science Foundation Ireland grant 10/CE/I1855 to Lero - the Irish Software Engineering Research Center (www.lero.ie). We thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Future Cities, DSG, Trinity College Dublin, College Green 2, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Nicolás Cardozo & Siobhán Clarke

  2. ICTEAM Institute, Université catholique de Louvain, Place Sainte-Barbe 2, 1348, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Kim Mens

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  1. Nicolás Cardozo
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Correspondence to Nicolás Cardozo .

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  1. University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

    Rogério de Lemos

  2. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    David Garlan

  3. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Carlo Ghezzi

  4. Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering, Potsdam, Germany

    Holger Giese

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Cardozo, N., Mens, K., Clarke, S. (2017). Models for the Consistent Interaction of Adaptations in Self-Adaptive Systems. In: de Lemos, R., Garlan, D., Ghezzi, C., Giese, H. (eds) Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems III. Assurances. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9640. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74183-3_11

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