Architectural Design Spaces for Feedback Control Concerns in Self-Adaptive Systems (S)

A lot of current research efforts in self-adaptive systems community have been dedicated to the explicit modeling of architectural aspects related to system self-awareness and context-awareness. This paper presents a flexible and extensible representation of architectural design spaces for selfadaptation approaches based on feedback control loops. We have defined a generic representation for design spaces metamodeling and have instantiated it in order to provide direct support for early reasoning and trade-off analysis of selfadaptation aspects with the aid of a set of feedback control metrics. The proposed approach has been fully implemented in a supporting tool and a case study with a distributed industrial data acquisition service has been undertaken. Whilst preliminary experiences with the proposed approach indicate useful reasoning support when comparing alternative design solutions for self-adaptation, further investigation regarding scalability aspects and automatic handling of conflicting goals has been identified as future work.