Abstract: Plan reuse is a promising approach for enabling self- systems to effectively adapt to unexpected changes, such as evolving existing adaptation strategies after an unexpected change using stochastic search. An ideal self- planner should be able to reuse repertoires of adaptation strategies, but this is challenging due to the evaluation overhead. For effective reuse, a repertoire should be both (a) likely to generalize to future situations, and (b) cost effective to evaluate. In this work, we present an approach inspired by chaos engineering for generating a diverse set of adaptation strategies to reuse, and we explore two analysis approaches based on clone detection and syntactic transformation for constructing repertoires of adaptation tactics that are likely to be amenable to reuse in stochastic search self-* planners. An evaluation of the proposed approaches on a simulated system inspired by Amazon AWS shows planning effectiveness improved by up to 20% and reveals tradeoffs in planning timeliness and optimality.

Abstract: Advanced persistent threats (APTs) are a particularly troubling challenge for software systems. The adversarial nature of the security domain, and APTs in particular, poses unresolved challenges to the design of self- systems, such as how to defend against multiple types of attackers with different goals and capabilities. In this interaction, the observability of each side is an important and under-investigated issue in the self- domain. We propose a model of APT defense that elevates observability as a first-class concern. We evaluate this model by showing how an informed approach that uses observability improves the defender’s utility compared to a uniform random strategy, can enable robust planning through sensitivity analysis, and can inform observability-related architectural design decisions.

Abstract: Many software systems operate in environments where change and uncertainty are the rule, rather than exceptions. Techniques for self-adaptation allow these systems to automatically respond to environmental changes, yet they do not handle changes to the adaptive system itself, such as the addition or removal of adaptation tactics. Instead, changes in a self-adaptive system often require a human planner to redo an expensive planning process to allow the system to continue satisfying its quality requirements under different conditions; automated techniques typically must replan from scratch. We propose to address this problem by reusing prior planning knowledge to adapt in the face of unexpected situations. We present a planner based on genetic programming that reuses existing plans. While reuse of material in genetic algorithms has recently applied successfully in the area of automated program repair, we find that naïvely reusing existing plans for self-* planning actually results in a loss of utility. Furthermore, we propose a series of techniques to lower the costs of reuse, allowing genetic techniques to leverage existing information to improve planning utility when replanning for unexpected changes.

Abstract: Increasingly software systems operate in environments of change and uncertainty, where the system's ability to satisfy its quality objectives depends on its ability to adapt. Self-adaptation allows these systems to manage this challenge by autonomously adapting to changes in their environments. While self-* systems are designed precisely to manage uncertainty, unexpected changes may violate design assumptions, resulting in the system failing to satisfy its quality attribute requirements. When this occurs, the planner must generate a new plan, an expensive operation for large systems. As autonomous systems increase in size, interconnectedness, and complexity, this cost can quickly become prohibitive.

This thesis addresses this problem by leveraging information contained in prior plans to reduce the replanning necessary to respond to an unexpected change. Even in the face of an unexpected change, some of the insights contained in existing plans are likely to remain applicable. For example, an autonomous aerial vehicle encountering an unexpected obstacle will need to replan to avoid the obstacle, but the drone may be able to return to its prior plan after this maneuver. A larger change will reduce the amount of reuse that is possible, for example changing the drone's mission to fly to a new location, but still, the takeoff and landing procedures may be reused. This thesis reuses existing adaptation plans by seeding a genetic algorithm with these plans. This enables a scalable self-* planner that can replan in complex systems with large search spaces.

While the idea of plan reuse is intuitive, in practice plan reuse is difficult and may even be worse than replanning from scratch if not performed carefully. This dissertation provides reuse enhancing approaches to reduce the evaluation time of candidate plans, an approach for building reusable repertoires of plans and identifying generalizable plan fragments, and a co-evolutionary extension to enable plan reuse for security. The thesis is evaluated on three simulated case study systems, including a cloud-based web service provider, a team of autonomous aerial vehicles, and an enterprise business system under a cyber attack. Ultimately, plan reuse will enable large self-* systems to replan even after unexpected changes.

Abstract: Many software systems operate in environments of change and uncertainty. Techniques for self-adaptation allow these systems to automatically respond to environmental changes, yet they do not handle changes to the adaptive system itself, such as the addition or removal of adaptation tactics. Instead, changes in a self-adaptive system often require a human planner to redo an expensive planning process to allow the system to continue satisfying its quality requirements under different conditions; automated techniques must replan from scratch. We propose to address this problem by reusing prior planning knowledge to adapt to unexpected situations. We present a planner based on genetic programming that reuses existing plans, and evaluate this planner on two case study systems: a cloud-based web server, and a team of autonomous aircraft. While reusing material in genetic algorithms has been recently applied successfully in the area of automated program repair, we find that naively reusing existing plans for self-* planning can actually result in a utility loss. Furthermore, we propose a series of techniques to lower the costs of reuse, allowing genetic techniques to leverage existing information to improve utility when replanning for unexpected changes, we also find that coarsely shaped search-spaces present profitable opportunities for reuse.