An Environment Aware Learning-based Self-Adaptation Technique with Reusable Components

Abstract

Self-adaptive systems appeared in order to reduce the effort of manual software maintenance. Apart from software attributes, for example, different alternative software modules, self-adaptation decisions depend on environmental attributes, for example, service rate, bandwidth etc. Current well-known self-adaptation approaches can be further improved by incorporating environmental attributes. Moreover, reducing maintenance effort includes minimizing both operational and development effort. To reduce the effort of developing self-adaptive software, the constituent components should be reusable. This paper proposes a technique to incorporate environmental attributes to learning-based self-adaptation and to increase the reuse potential of self-adaptive system components. The environmental attributes are provided as a constraint to an optimization problem which results in an optimal software attribute selection. Design patterns for self-adaptive system components are proposed to improve its reusability. The proposed technique was validated on a news serving website called Znn.com. According to renowned reusability metrics such as Lines of Code (LOC), Message Passing Coupling (MPC) and Lack of Cohesion of Methods 4 (LCOM4), the proposed technique improved reuse potential. The website was further tested for adaptation effectiveness under two scenarios – adaptation and without adaptation. According to our experiments, Adaptation gradually improved the main goal response time of the website where it performed poorly without adaptation.