A Survey on Self-adaptation Planning Optimization Techniques

Self-adaptation planning is a challenging task being time and resource consuming. It can be affected by multiple sources of uncertainty as it deals with frequently changing contexts. In addition, it requires real-time information, which is unpredictable at design time, to offer high quality adaptation solution. To deal with these issues, a wide range of studies proposed techniques to optimize the adaptation planning process regarding two aspects namely: planning timeliness and the quality of the provided adaptation solution. However, these two criteria are conflicting in nature i.e. improving the performance of the planning in terms of response time deteriorates the quality of the adaptation solution and vice-versa. Therefore, the adaptation research community witnesses the emergence of multiple studies of which the ultimate goal is to obtain a tradeoff between the two aspects. In this paper, we aim to highlight the key design objectives that affect the planning design and implementation. Moreover, we present the planning optimization techniques proposed in the literature and categorize them to give an understandable view of this specific area of Self-Adaptive Systems (SASs).