Dealing with multiple failures in zanshin: a control-theoretic approach

Abstract

Adaptive software systems monitor the environment to ensure that their requirements are being fullled. When this is not the case, their adaptation mechanism proposes an adaptation (a change to the behaviour/configuration) that can lead to restored satisfaction of system requirements. Unfortunately, such adaptation mechanisms don't work very well in cases where there are multiple failures (divergence of system behaviour relative to several requirements). This paper proposes an adaptation mechanism that can handle multiple failures. The proposal consists of extending the Qualia adaptation mechanism of Zanshin enriched with features adopted from Control Theory. The proposed framework supports the definition of requirements for the adaptation process prescribing how to deal at runtime with problems such as conflicting requirements and synchronization, enhancing the precision and effectiveness of the adaptation mechanism. The proposed mechanism, named Qualia+ is illustrated and evaluated with an example using the meeting scheduling exemplar.