Requirements engineering for self-adaptive systems: Core ontology and problem statement

Abstract

The vision for self-adaptive systems (SAS) is that they should continuously adapt their behavior at runtime in response to changing user's requirements, operating contexts, and resource availability. Realizing this vision requires that we understand precisely how the various steps in the engineering of SAS depart from the established body of knowledge in information systems engineering. We focus in this paper on the requirements engineering for SAS. We argue that SAS need to have an internal representation of the requirements problem that they are solving for their users. We formally define a minimal set of concepts and relations needed to formulate the requirements problem, its solutions, the changes in its formulation that arise from changes in the operating context, requirements, and resource availability. We thereby precisely define the runtime requirements adaptation problem that a SAS should be engineered to solve. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.