Experiences from Developing a Component Technology Agnostic Adaptation Framework

Systems are increasingly expected to adapt themselves to changing requirements and environmental situations with minimum user interactions. A challenge for self-adaptation is the increasing heterogeneity of applications and services, integrating multiple systems implemented in different platform and language technologies. In order to cope with this heterogeneity, self-adaptive systems need to support the integration of various technologies, allowing the target adaptive system to be built from subsystems realized with different implementation technologies. In this paper, we argue that state-of-the adaptation frameworks do not lend themselves to ease technology integration and exploitation of advanced features and opportunities offered by different implementation technologies. We present the QUA adaptation framework and its support for technology integration and exploitation. Unlike other adaptation frameworks the adaptation framework of QUA is able to exploit a wide range of adaptation mechanisms and technologies, without modification to the adaptation framework itself. As a demonstration of this property of QUA, we describe the integration of an advanced component model technology, the FRACTAL component model, with the QUA framework. Our experience from this exercise shows that the QUA adaptation framework indeed allows integration of advanced implementation technologies with moderate effort.