Control Strategies for Self-Adaptive Software Systems

Antonio Filieri, Cristian Klein, Filip Krikava, Sasa Misailovic, Alessandro V. Papadopoulos, Suprio Ray, Amir M. Sharifloo, Stepan Shevtsov, Mateusz Ujma, Thomas Vogel, Martina Maggio, Konstantinos Angelopoulos (+6 others)
2017 ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems  
The pervasiveness and growing complexity of software systems is challenging software engineering to design systems that can adapt their behavior to withstand unpredictable, uncertain, and continuously changing execution environments. Control theoretical adaptation mechanisms received a growing interest from the software engineering community in the last years for their mathematical grounding allowing formal guarantees on the behavior of the controlled systems. However, most of these mechanisms
more » ... re tailored to specific applications and can hardly be generalized into broadly applicable software design and development processes. This paper discusses a reference control design process, from goal identification to the verification and validation of the controlled system. A taxonomy of the main control strategies is introduced, analyzing their applicability to software adaptation for both functional and non-functional goals. A brief extract on how to deal with uncertainty complements the discussion. Finally, the paper highlights a set of open challenges, both for the software engineering and the control theory research communities.
doi:10.1145/3024188 fatcat:zt3ublqyfvbl3ibpwlqvwdhcby