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Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems: A Second Research Roadmap

Reference: de Lemos, R., Giese, H., Müller, H. A., Shaw, M., et al. (2013). Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems: A Second Research Roadmap. In Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems II, LNCS 7475, Springer, pp. 1–32. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-35813-5_1. URL

Summary

The second SEAMS roadmap, produced four years after the first, takes stock of the field’s progress and re-sets the agenda around what the community had learned to be the genuinely hard problems. Where the first roadmap partitioned the space, this one is organised around four thematic challenges that had emerged as central: design space (systematically characterising the choices a designer of a self-adaptive system faces), processes (development and lifecycle processes that span design time and runtime), decentralisation of control loops (moving beyond a single MAPE-K loop to multiple, interacting control loops and coordination patterns among them), and practical run-time verification and validation (V&V).

The roadmap’s sharpest emphasis is on assurance: it argues that self-adaptive systems demand a continuous supply of evidence that requirements are still met as the system and its environment change, shifting V&V from a design-time gate to a runtime, incremental activity. It highlights the need to reason explicitly about the uncertainty that motivates adaptation, to make control loops (and their interactions) explicit architectural entities, and to develop perpetual assurance techniques — including quantitative and formal methods applied at runtime — that keep pace with adaptation. It is the standard “state of the field, part II” reference for engineering and assuring self-adaptive software.

Key Ideas

  • Four thematic challenges: design space, processes (design-time + runtime), decentralised control loops, and practical run-time V&V.
  • Decentralised control: self-adaptive systems increasingly need multiple interacting MAPE-K loops with explicit coordination, not one central loop.
  • Perpetual / runtime assurance: continuous, incremental evidence that goals still hold, replacing one-shot design-time verification.
  • Uncertainty is first-class: adaptation exists to handle it, so it must be modelled and reasoned about explicitly across the lifecycle.
  • Positions runtime quantitative verification and formal runtime models as key enabling techniques for assurance.

Connections

Conceptual Contribution

Tags

#self-adaptive #software-engineering #mape-k #runtime-assurance #decentralised-control #roadmap

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