RASO: An ontology on requirements for the development of adaptive systems

Abstract

There is growing interest in software that can adapt their behavior to deal with deviations between their outcome and their requirements at runtime. A systematic mapping of the literature on self-adaptation approaches based on requirements models revealed over 200 papers on this subject. However, there is still a lack of a formal and explicit representation of the concepts in this domain, which can lead to problems in communication, learning, problem-solving, interoperability, etc. To make a clear and precise description of this domain, this paper proposes RASO: the Requirements for Adaptive Systems Ontology. RASO was built using a well-established Ontology Engineering method, is grounded on a foundational ontology and reuses concepts from other software-related ontologies. The ontology was evaluated by mapping constructs from the most referenced approaches from the literature to its concepts, thus creating a path for interoperability among them.