Self-adaptivity from different application perspectives: Requirements, realizations, reflections

Abstract

Self-adaptivity can be beneficial in many application domains. In recent years we have researched the engineering of self-adaptive software systems in three rather diverse domains: ubiquitous computing applications, teams of autonomous mobile robots, and management of service-oriented software systems. While all of them perform dynamic adaptation at run-time following a specified control loop, they differ fundamentally in their specific objectives, requirements, properties, and constraints. Consequently, their design and realization focus on different domain aspects and require different modeling and engineering techniques. In this paper we elaborate on synergies and discrepancies in developing the three case studies. We evaluate these self-adaptive systems using a recently published framework for evaluating self-adaptive software systems. The main contributions of this paper are a reflection on the design space of self-adaptive systems and a critique of the proposed evaluation framework. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.