Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo

Engineering Self-Adaptive Systems through Feedback Loops

To deal with the increasing complexity of software systems and uncertainty of their environments, software engineers have turned to self-adaptivity. Self-adaptive systems are capable of dealing with a continuously changing environment and emerging requirements that may be unknown at design-time. However, building such systems cost-effectively and in a predictable manner is a major engineering challenge. In this paper, we explore the state-of-the-art in engineering self-adaptive systems and identify potential improvements in the design process. Our most important finding is that in designing self-adaptive systems, the feedback loops that control self-adaptation must become first-class entities. We explore feedback loops from the perspective of control engineering and within existing self-adaptive systems in nature and biology. Finally, we identify the critical challenges our community must address to enable systematic and well-organized engineering of self-adaptive and self-managing software systems.

Engineering Self-Organising Systems

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Self-organization in multi-agent systems

This paper is the synthesis of joint work realised in a technical forum group within the AgentLink III NoE framework, which elaborated on issues concerning self-organization and emergence in multi-agent systems (MAS). The work concluded on a common definition of the concepts of self-organization and emergence in MAS and the associated properties and characteristics. Also it developed towards an approach for selecting self-organization mechanisms using a number of selected reference case studies and a set of evaluation criteria.

Description and composition of bio-inspired design patterns: a complete overview

In the last decade, bio-inspired self-organising mechanisms have been applied to different domains, achieving results beyond traditional approaches. However, researchers usually use these mechanisms in an ad-hoc manner. In this way, their interpretation, definition, boundary (i.e. when one mechanism stops, and when another starts), and implementation typically vary in the existing literature, thus preventing these mechanisms from being applied clearly and systematically to solve recurrent problems. To ease engineering of artificial bio-inspired systems, this paper describes a catalogue of bio-inspired mechanisms in terms of modular and reusable design patterns organised into different layers. This catalogue uniformly frames and classifies a variety of different patterns. Additionally, this paper places the design patterns inside existing self-organising methodologies and hints for selecting and using a design pattern.

Self-organisation: paradigms and applications

A self-organising system functions without central control, and through contextual local interactions. Components achieve a simple task individually, but a complex collective behaviour emerges from their mutual interactions. Such a system modifies its structure and functionality to adapt to changes to requirements and to the environment based on previous experience. Nature provides examples of self-organisation, such as ants food foraging, molecules formation, or antibodies detection. Similarly, current software applications are driven by social interactions (negotiations, transactions), based on autonomous entities or agents, and run in highly dynamic environments. The issue of engineering applications, based on the principles of self-organisation to achieve robustness and adaptability, is gaining increasing interest in the software research community. The aim of this paper is to survey natural and artificial complex systems exhibiting emergent behaviour, and to outline the mechanisms enabling such behaviours.

A survey of theories for mobile agents

This paper presents a comparative survey of formalisms related to mobile agents. It describes the π-calculus and its extensions, the Ambient calculus, Petri nets, Actors, and the family of generative communication languages. Each of these formalisms defines a mathematical framework that can be used to reason about mobile code; they vary greatly in their expressiveness, in the mechanisms they provide to specify mobile code based applications and in their practical usefulness for the validation and the verification of such applications. In this paper we show how these formalisms can be used to represent the mobility and communication aspects of two mobile code environments: Obliq and Messengers. We compare and classify the different formalisms with respect to mobility and discuss some shortcomings and desirable extensions. We also point to other emerging concepts in formalisms for mobile code systems.

Developing pervasive multi-agent systems with nature-inspired coordination

Pervasive computing systems can be modelled effectively as populations of interacting autonomous components. The key challenge to realizing such models is in getting separately-specified and -developed sub-systems to discover and interoperate with each other in an open and extensible way, supported by appropriate middleware services. In this paper, we argue that nature-inspired coordination models offer a promising way of addressing this challenge. We first frame the various dimensions along which nature-inspired coordination models can be defined, and survey the most relevant proposals in the area. We describe the nature-inspired coordination model developed within the SAPERE project as a synthesis of existing approaches, and show how it can effectively support the multifold requirements of modern and emerging pervasive services. We conclude by identifying what we think are the open research challenges in this area, and identify some research directions that we believe are promising.

A metadata-based architectural model for dynamically resilient systems

Designing open and distributed systems that can dynamically adapt in a predictable way to unexpected events is a challenging issue still not solved. Achieving this objective is a very complex task since it implies reasoning at run-time, explicitly and in a combined way, on a systems functional and non-functional characteristics. This paper proposes a service-oriented architectural model allowing the dynamic enforcement of formally expressed metadata-based resilience policies. It also describes preliminary dynamic resilience experiments acting as proof of concept.

MetaSelf: an architecture and a development method for dependable self-* systems

This paper proposes a software architecture and a development process for engineering dependable and controllable self-organising (SO) systems. Our approach addresses dependability by exploiting metadata to support decision making and adaptation based on the dynamic enforcement of explicitly defined policies. Control is obtained by actively modifying metadata, policies or components. We show how this applies to two different systems: (1) a dynamically resilient Web service system; and (2) an industrial assembly system with self-adaptive and SO capabilities.

An architecture for self-managing evolvable assembly systems

Agile manufacturing requires high responsiveness at all levels of a company, but is especially challenging on the shop-floor level. Evolvable Assembly Systems (EAS) are a solution: agentified modules can be seamlessly integrated into existing systems, or removed at any instant. EAS offer a more flexible solution to automation production, but many system design and integration tasks are still done manually. Our goal is to make EAS increasingly self-managing: 1) to easily and quickly produce a new or re-configured assembly system each time a new product order arrives or each time a failure or weakness arises in the current assembly system and 2) to maintain production also under degraded conditions. This article describes an architecture for self-managing evolvable assembly systems. It involves on-the-fly self-assembly of robotic modules, dynamic coordination of tasks and self-adaptation to production conditions, mainly self-healing and self-optimisation. The architecture exploits self-description of modules, monitored modules behaviour and dynamic policies.