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Challenges in Composing and Decomposing Assurances for Self-Adaptive Systems

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Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems III. Assurances

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9640))

Abstract

Self-adaptive software systems adapt to changes in the environment, in the system itself, in their requirements, or in their business objectives. Typically, these systems attempt to maintain system goals at run time and often provide assurance that they will meet their goals under dynamic and uncertain circumstances. While significant research has focused on ways to engineer self-adaptive capabilities into both new and legacy software systems, less work has been conducted on how to assure that self-adaptation maintains system goals. For traditional, especially safety-critical software systems, assurance techniques decompose assurances into sub-goals and evidence that can be provided by parts of the system. Existing approaches also exist for composing assurances, in terms of composing multiple goals and composing assurances in systems of systems. While some of these techniques may be applied to self-adaptive systems, we argue that several significant challenges remain in applying them to self-adaptive systems in this chapter. We discuss how existing assurance techniques can be applied to composing and decomposing assurances for self-adaptive systems, highlight the challenges in applying them, summarize existing research to address some of these challenges, and identify gaps and opportunities to be addressed by future research.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Bradley Schmerl

  2. Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden

    Jesper Andersson

  3. Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Thomas Vogel

  4. University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Myra B. Cohen

  5. University of Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil

    Cecilia M. F. Rubira

  6. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

    Yuriy Brun

  7. IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain

    Alessandra Gorla

  8. University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

    Franco Zambonelli

  9. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Luciano Baresi

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  1. Bradley Schmerl
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  2. Jesper Andersson
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  3. Thomas Vogel
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  4. Myra B. Cohen
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  5. Cecilia M. F. Rubira
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  6. Yuriy Brun
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  7. Alessandra Gorla
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  8. Franco Zambonelli
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  9. Luciano Baresi
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Correspondence to Bradley Schmerl .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

    Rogério de Lemos

  2. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    David Garlan

  3. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Carlo Ghezzi

  4. Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering, Potsdam, Germany

    Holger Giese

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Schmerl, B. et al. (2017). Challenges in Composing and Decomposing Assurances for Self-Adaptive Systems. In: de Lemos, R., Garlan, D., Ghezzi, C., Giese, H. (eds) Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems III. Assurances. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9640. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74183-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74183-3_3

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