Uncertainty in Self-adaptive Systems: A Research Community Perspective

One of the primary drivers for self-adaptation is ensuring that systems achieve their goals regardless of the uncertainties they face during operation. Nevertheless, the concept of uncertainty in self-adaptive systems is still insufficiently understood. Several taxonomies of uncertainty have been proposed, and a substantial body of work exists on methods to tame uncertainty. Yet, these taxonomies and methods do not fully convey the research community’s perception on what constitutes uncertainty in self-adaptive systems and on the key characteristics of the approaches needed to tackle uncertainty. To understand this perception and learn from it, we conducted a survey comprising two complementary stages in which we collected the views of 54 and 51 participants, respectively. In the first stage, we focused on current research and development, exploring how the concept of uncertainty is understood in the community and how uncertainty is currently handled in the engineering of self-adaptive systems. In the second stage, we focused on directions for future research to identify potential approaches to dealing with unanticipated changes and other open challenges in handling uncertainty in self-adaptive systems. The key findings of the first stage are: (a) an overview of uncertainty sources considered in self-adaptive systems, (b) an overview of existing methods used to tackle uncertainty in concrete applications, (c) insights into the impact of uncertainty on non-functional requirements, (d) insights into different opinions in the perception of uncertainty within the community and the need for standardised uncertainty-handling processes to facilitate uncertainty management in self-adaptive systems. The key findings of the second stage are: (a) the insight that over 70% of the participants believe that self-adaptive systems can be engineered to cope with unanticipated change, (b) a set of potential approaches for dealing with unanticipated change, (c) a set of open challenges in mitigating uncertainty in self-adaptive systems, in particular in those with safety-critical requirements. From these findings, we outline an initial reference process to manage uncertainty in self-adaptive systems. We anticipate that the insights on uncertainty obtained from the community and our proposed reference process will inspire valuable future research on self-adaptive systems.