Self-adaptive applications: on the development of personalized web-tasking systems

Personalized Web-Tasking (PWT) proposes the automation of user-centric and repetitive web interactions to assist users in the fulfilment of personal goals using internet systems. In PWT, both personal goals and internet systems are affected by unpredictable changes in user preferences, situations, system infrastructures and environments. Therefore, self-adaptation enhanced with dynamic context monitoring is required to guarantee the effectiveness of PWT systems that, despite context uncertainty, must guarantee the accomplishment of personal goals and deliver pleasant user experiences. This position paper describes our approach to the development of PWT systems, which relies on self-adaptation and its enabling technologies. In particular, it presents our runtime modelling approach that is comprised of our PWT Ontology and Goal-oriented Context-sensitive web-tasking (GCT) models, and the way we exploit previous SEAMS contributions developed in our research group, the DYNAMICO reference model and the SmarterContext Monitoring Infrastructure and Reasoning Engine. The main goal of this paper is to demonstrate how the most crucial challenges in the engineering of PWT systems can be addressed by implementing them as self-adaptive software.