4th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Self-Adaptive, Collaborative, and Cyber Physical Systems (RESACS) (original) (raw)

Requirements-Aware Systems: A Research Agenda for RE for Self-adaptive Systems

2010 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, 2010

Requirements are sensitive to the context in which the system-to-be must operate. Where such context is well-understood and is static or evolves slowly, existing RE techniques can be made to work well. Increasingly, however, development projects are being challenged to build systems to operate in contexts that are volatile over short periods in ways that are imperfectly understood. Such systems need to be able to adapt to new environmental contexts dynamically, but the contextual uncertainty that demands this self-adaptive ability makes it hard to formulate, validate and manage their requirements. Different contexts may demand different requirements trade-offs. Unanticipated contexts may even lead to entirely new requirements. To help counter this uncertainty, we argue that requirements for selfadaptive systems should be run-time entities that can be reasoned over in order to understand the extent to which they are being satisfied and to support adaptation decisions that can take advantage of the systems' self-adaptive machinery. We take our inspiration from the fact that explicit, abstract representations of software architectures used to be considered design-time-only entities but computational reflection showed that architectural concerns could be represented at run-time too, helping systems to dynamically reconfigure themselves according to changing context. We propose to use analogous mechanisms to achieve requirements reflection. In this paper we discuss the ideas that support requirements reflection as a means to articulate some of the outstanding research challenges.

A Systematic Literature Review of Requirements Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems

During 2003 to 2013, the continuous effort of researchers and engineers particularly has resulted in a hugely grown body of work on engineering self-adaptive systems. Although existing studies have explored various aspects of this topic, no systematic study has been performed on categorizing and evaluating the requirement engineering for self-adaptive activities. The objective of this paper is to systematically investigate the research literature of requirements engineering for self-adaptive systems, summarize the research trends, categorize the used modeling methods and requirements engineering activities as well as the topics that most described. a systematic literature review has been conducted to answer the research questions by searching relevant studies, appraising the quality of these studies and extracting available data. From the study, a number of recommendations for future research in requirements engineering for self-adaptive systems has been derived. So that, enabling researchers and practitioners to better understand the research trends.

A Language for Self-Adaptive System Requirements

2008 International Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing: Consequences for Engineering Requirements, 2008

Self-adaptive systems have the capability to autonomously modify their behaviour at run-time in response to changes in their environment. Such systems are now commonly built in domains as diverse as enterprise computing, automotive control systems, and environmental monitoring systems. To date, however, there has been limited attention paid to how to engineer requirements for such systems. As a result, selfadaptivity is often constructed in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we argue that a more rigorous treatment of requirements relating to self-adaptivity is needed and that, in particular, requirements languages for self-adaptive systems should include explicit constructs for specifying and dealing with the uncertainty inherent in self-adaptive systems. We present some initial thoughts on a new requirements language for selfadaptive systems and illustrate it using examples from the services domain.

Review on Requirements Modeling and Analysis for Self-Adaptive Systems: A Ten-Year Perspective

ArXiv, 2017

Context: Over the last decade, software researchers and engineers have developed a vast body of methodologies and technologies in requirements engineering for self-adaptive systems. Although existing studies have explored various aspects of this field, no systematic study has been performed on summarizing modeling methods and corresponding requirements activities. Objective: This study summarizes the state-of-the-art research trends, details the modeling methods and corresponding requirements activities, identifies relevant quality attributes and application domains and assesses the quality of each study. Method: We perform a systematic literature review underpinned by a rigorously established and reviewed protocol. To ensure the quality of the study, we choose 21 highly regarded publication venues and 8 popular digital libraries. In addition, we apply text mining to derive search strings and use Kappa coefficient to mitigate disagreements of researchers. Results: We selected 109 pa...

A Thematic Study of Requirements Modeling and Analysis for Self-Adaptive Systems

2017

Over the last decade, researchers and engineers have developed a vast body of methodologies and technologies in requirements engineering for self-adaptive systems. Although existing studies have explored various aspects of this topic, few of them have categorized and summarized these areas of research in require-ments modeling and analysis. This study aims to investigate the research themes based on the utilized modeling methods and RE activities. We conduct a thematic study in the systematic literature review. The results are derived by synthesizing the extracted data with statistical methods. This paper provides an updated review of the research literature, enabling researchers and practitioners to better understand the research themes in these areas and identify research gaps which need to be further studied.

An Architecture Framework for Experimentations with Self-Adaptive Cyber-physical Systems

2015 IEEE/ACM 10th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems, 2015

Recent advances in embedded devices capabilities and wireless networks paved the way for creating ubiquitous Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) grafted with self-configuring and self-adaptive capabilities. As these systems need to strike a balance between dependability, open-endedness and adaptability, and operate in dynamic and opportunistic environments, their design and development is particularly challenging. We take an architecture-based approach to this problem and advocate the use of component-based abstractions and related machinery to engineer self-adaptive CPS. Our approach is structured around DEECo -a component framework that introduces the concept of component ensembles to deal with the dynamicity of CPS at the middleware level. DEECo provides the architecture abstractions of autonomous components and component ensembles on top of which different adaptation techniques can be deployed. This makes DEECo a vehicle for seamless experiments with selfadaptive systems where the physical distribution and mobility of nodes, and the limited data availability play an important role.

SACRE: Supporting contextual requirements’ adaptation in modern self-adaptive systems in the presence of uncertainty at runtime

Expert Systems with Applications

Runtime uncertainty such as unpredictable resource unavailability, changing environmental conditions and user needs, as well as system intrusions or faults represents one of the main current challenges of self-adaptive systems. Moreover, today's systems are increasingly more complex, distributed, decentralized, etc. and therefore have to reason about and cope with more and more unpredictable events. Approaches to deal with such changing requirements in complex today's systems are still missing. This work presents SACRE (Smart Adaptation through Contextual REquirements), our approach leveraging an adaptation feedback loop to detect self-adaptive systems' contextual requirements affected by uncertainty and to integrate machine learning techniques to determine the best operationalization of context based on sensed data at runtime. SACRE is a step forward of our former approach ACon which focus had been on adapting the context in contextual requirements, as well as their basic implementation. SACRE primarily focuses on architectural decisions, addressing selfadaptive systems' engineering challenges. Furthering the work on ACon, in this paper, we perform an evaluation of the entire approach in different uncertainty scenarios in real-time in the extremely demanding domain of smart vehicles. The real-time evaluation is conducted in a simulated environment in which the smart vehicle is implemented through software components. The evaluation results provide empirical evidence about the applicability of SACRE in real and complex software system domains.

Required Changes in Requirements Engineering Approaches for Socio-Cyber-Physical Systems

2018

Requirements engineering has been mainly focused on software development, which represents relatively homogenous, stable and predictable cyber space. But even there, problems in requirements (e.g., changing, missing or irrelevant requirements) are considered as main reasons for project failure. Entering a new era of socio-cyber-physical systems, which are complex, heterogeneous systems of systems, will make requirements engineering even more challenging. Not only it is a standard practice that requirements change and evolve, and new requirements emerge frequently during the system life cycle. In socio-cyberphysical systems, requirements cannot be defined just for the cyber space, but must cover also the socio and physical spaces. There are also highly complex interrelationships, interactions and impacts between components of systems that can lead to unexpected and even unacceptable consequences in system structure and behaviour. One of the promising approaches supporting adaptabilit...

Towards a requirements specification multi-view framework for self-adaptive systems

2014 XL Latin American Computing Conference (CLEI), 2014

The analysis of self-adaptive systems (SAS) requirements involves addressing uncertainty from several sources. Despite advances in requirements for SAS, uncertainty remains an extremely difficult challenge. In this paper, we propose REFAS, a framework to model the requirements of self-adaptive software systems. Our aim with REFAS is to address and reduce uncertainty and to provide a language with sufficient power of expression to specify the different aspects of self-adaptive systems, relative to functional and non-functional requirements. The REFAS modeling language includes concepts closely related to these kind of requirements and their fulfillment, such as context variables, claims, and soft dependencies. Specifically, the paper's contribution is twofold. First, REFAS supports different viewpoints and concerns related to requirements modeling, with key associations between them. Moreover, the modeler can define additional models and views by exploiting the REFAS meta-modeling capability, in order to capture additional aspects contributing to reduce uncertainty. Second, REFAS promotes in-depth analysis of all of the modeled concerns with aggregation and association capabilities, especially with context variables. Furthermore, we also define a process that enforces modeling requirements, considering different aspects of uncertainty. We demonstrate the applicability of REFAS by using the VariaMos software tool, which implements the REFAS meta-model, views, and process.

Modeling and verification of Functional and Non-Functional Requirements of ambient Self-Adaptive Systems

Journal of Systems and Software, 2015

Self-Adaptive Systems modify their behavior at run-time in response to changing environmental conditions. For these systems, Non-Functional Requirements play an important role, and one has to identify as early as possible the requirements that are adaptable. We propose an integrated approach for modeling and verifying the requirements of Self-Adaptive Systems using Model Driven Engineering techniques. For this, we use Relax, which is a Requirements Engineering language which introduces flexibility in Non-Functional Requirements. We then use the concepts of Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering for eliciting and modeling the requirements of Self-Adaptive Systems. For properties verification, we use OMEGA2/IFx profile and toolset. We illustrate our proposed approach by applying it on an academic case study.