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Control strategies for self-adaptive software systems
Filieri A., Maggio M., Angelopoulos K., D’ippolito N., Gerostathopoulos I., Hempel A., Hoffmann H., Jamshidi P., Kalyvianaki E., Klein C., Krikava F., Misailovic S., Papadopoulos A., Ray S., Sharifloo A., Shevtsov S., Ujma M., Vogel T. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems11 (4):1-31,2017.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Apr 13 2018

How can we develop advanced control strategies for self-adaptive software systems? If you are interested in an extended answer, please read this paper. Its aim is to provide an overview of the control techniques that are well known in the control community and can be used for the design of self-adaptive software.

Control strategies can be applied to discover adaptation mechanisms to design more robust software for an uncertain dynamic environment, new requirements, and unpredictable operating conditions. This paper is related to control theory based on some mathematically grounded techniques for designing controllers. The authors assume that “controllers can provide formal guarantees about their effectiveness under precise assumptions on the operating conditions.” Moreover, they can ensure that industrial systems behave as expected. Because some adaptation mechanisms in engineering software lack theoretical grounding, control theory can fill this gap by taking into account the fact that current adaptation mechanisms “can hardly be generalized to broadly applicable methodologies.”

The authors proficiently discuss some complications for applying control theoretical results to software systems, like “the difficulty in abstracting a software behavior in a mathematical form suitable for controller design.” Furthermore, there is no methodology in software engineering following controllability as a first-class criterion. However, software engineers have some dilemmas in understanding the mathematical models. Despite these difficulties, there are some proofs that “control theoretical results can improve the design of computing systems,” especially in terms of performance management and resources. Also, “new software models and a variety of quantitative and functional requirements” are discussed for self-adaptive software. The design of self-adaptive operating systems and autonomic computing can be considered in a controller context.

In this paper, the authors provide “a comprehensive analysis of the control theoretical design of self-adaptive software systems, matching the various phases of software development with the relevant ... techniques from control theory.” A detailed taxonomy of the most important control strategies is presented, due to their applicability to software problems. Some of the contributions of software engineering to controller design are studied, as well as some implementation and validation problems. The authors also describe “a set of challenges for [the] control of self-adaptive systems.”

Incontestably, applying control strategies for self-adaptive software systems is an innovative approach based on modern computer methods. It is significant to underline the meaning of the goals of a control strategy to build an effective application.

Reviewer:  Jerzy Balicki Review #: CR145976 (1806-0317)
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Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) (D.2.2 ... )
 
 
Model Validation And Analysis (I.6.4 )
 
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