Goal-oriented specification of adaptation requirements engineering in adaptive systems

Abstract

Adaptive software is being used increasingly frequently by various users, such as the medical community, software industry, and in response to terror attacks. Therefore, understanding the requirements of an adaptive system is crucial to developing them correctly. Developers need to be able to reason about the requirements of a system's adaptive behavior. Adaptation semantics are intended to describe how systems behave during adaptation. Previously, Zhang and Cheng formally specified three commonly occurring adaptation semantics in terms of Adapt operator-extended LTL (A-LTL). This paper presents goal-oriented specifications of these three adaptation semantics. These specifications, specified with the KAOS methodology, provide a graphical wrapper to the formal A-LTL specifications of the semantics. The combination of the goal-oriented, graphical KAOS specifications and A-LTL specifications provides the benefits of formal specifications as well as the benefits of an easier to understand, graphical, and more intuitive presentation of adaptive systems requirements. This work also provides a means to incorporate the adaptation semantics into the goal-oriented requirements specifications of an adaptive system.