Abstract: Self-adaptive systems typically operate in heterogeneous environments and need to optimize their behavior based on a variety of quality attributes to meet stakeholders' needs. During adaptation planning, these quality attributes are considered in the form of constraints, describing requirements that must be fulfilled, and utility functions, which are used to select an optimal plan among several alternatives. Up until now, most automated planning approaches are not designed to adapt quality attributes, their priorities, and their trade-offs at run time. Instead, both utility functions and constraints are commonly defined at design time. There exists a clear lack of run-time mechanisms that support their adaptation in response to changes in the environment or in stakeholders' preferences. In this paper, we present initial work that combines automated planning and adaptation of quality attributes to address this gap. The approach helps to semi-automatically adjust utility functions and constraints based on changes at run time. We present a preliminary experimental evaluation that indicates that our approach can provide plans with higher utility values while fulfilling changed or added constraints. We conclude this paper with our envisioned research outlook and plans for future empirical studies.
Abstract: An increasingly important class of software-based systems is plat-forms that permit integration of third-party components, services, and tools. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one such plat-form that has been successful in providing integration and distri-bution in the business domain, and could be effective in other domains (e.g., scientific computing, healthcare, and complex deci-sion making). In this paper, we discuss our application of SOA to provide an integration platform for socio-cultural analysis, a domain that, through models, tries to understand, analyze and predict relationships in large complex social systems. In developing this platform, called SORASCS, we had to overcome issues we believe are generally applicable to any application of SOA within a domain that involves technically naïve users and seeks to establish a sustainable software ecosystem based on a common integration platform. We discuss those issues and the lessons learned about the kinds of problems that occur, and pathways toward a solution.
David Garlan, Kathleen M. Carley,
Bradley Schmerl, Michael W. Bigrigg and
Orieta Celiku. Using Service-Oriented Architectures for Socio-Cultural Analysis. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE2009), Boston, USA. July 1-3, 2009.
Abstract: An emergent domain that raises some unique engineering challenges is that of software architectures to convert large bodies of unstructured data to human-usable knowledge, such as in the domain of socio-cultural information analysis. We report on an architecture based on Service-Oriented Architectures that we are applying in this domain. We list the requirements that such an architecture must support, describe our architecture for addressing them, and outline what we believe are the important engineering and research issues that must still be overcome.
Dan Glastonbury, Chris Marlin, Michael Read and
Bradley Schmerl. Run-time views as a debugging aid in an integrated software development environment. In 1997 Software Visualisation Workshop, Adelaide, South Australia, Flinders University, South Australia. pp. 51-59. December, 1997.