Designing search based adaptive systems: a quantitative approach

Designing an adaptive system to meet its quality constraints in the face of environmental uncertainties can be a challenging task. In cloud environment, a designer has to also consider and evaluate different control points, i.e., those variables that affect the quality of the software system. This paper presents a method for eliciting, evaluating and ranking control points for web applications deployed in cloud environments. The proposed method consists of several phases that take high-level stakeholders' adaptation goals and transform them into lower level MAPE-K loop control points. The MAPE-K loops are then activated at runtime using search-based algorithms. We conducted several experiments to evaluate the different phases of our methodology.