Context-Aware Adaptive Software Systems: A System-Context Relationships Oriented Survey

Self-adaptivity and context-awareness have been proposed to provide the ability for a software system to adapt itself at runtime to cope with changes in its environment and the user needs. In research, selfadaptivity is more concerned with how to adapt the system, while context-awareness is more concerned with how to model, process, and manage the system environment information. In general, context-aware adaptive software systems need to consider both aspects and have the ability to sense the context changes and adapt upon them. However, research in self-adaptivity and contextawareness has been carried out largely in separate communities, with limited reference to each other. In this report we present an analytical survey of research into context-aware adaptive software systems from both of these perspectives, with a particular focus on issues concerning their integration. We identify the requirements of integrating context-awareness and self-adaptivity to better understand their relationship, analyse the current research in context-awareness and self-adaptivity regarding these requirements, and distil the research challenges in developing context-aware adaptive software systems.