Quality aware approach for engineering self-adaptive software systems

QUALITY-AWARE APPROACH FOR
ENGINEERING SELF-ADAPTIVE SOFTWARE
SYSTEMS
Mohammed Abufouda
Department of Computer Science,
Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany
abufouda@cs.uni-kl.de

ABSTRACT
Self-adaptivity allows software systems to autonomously adjust their behavior during run-time to reduce
the cost complexities caused by manual maintenance. In this paper, an approach for building an external
adaptation engine for self-adaptive software systems is proposed. In order to improve the quality of selfadaptive software systems, this research addresses two challenges in self-adaptive software systems. The
first challenge is managing the complexity of the adaptation space efficiently and the second is handling the
run-time uncertainty that hinders the adaptation process. This research utilizes Case-based Reasoning as
an adaptation engine along with utility functions for realizing the managed system’s requirements and
handling uncertainty.

KEYWORDS
Software Quality, Model-Driven Software, Self-adaptive Software Systems, Case-based Reasoning,
Run-time Uncertainty

1. INTRODUCTION
The majority of the existing work in the literature agrees [1][2] that self-adaptivity in software
systems is the ability of a software system to adjust its behaviour during run time to handle
software system's complexity and maintenance costs [3] while preserving the requirement of the
system. This property dictates the presence of an adaptation mechanism in order to build the logic
of self-adaptivity without human intervention. Developing a self-adaptive software system is
subjected to many challenges like handling the complexity of the adaptation space of the
managed system. This complexity is conceived when the number of the states that the managed
system can run in is relatively large. Also, this complexity manifests itself when new states are
needed to be inferred from previous one i.e. learning from past experience. Another challenge is
the uncertainty that hinders the adaption process during run-time. This paper will address these
challenges.More precisely, our framework is concerned with the following problems:
•

Adaptation responsible unit: The majority of the existing work do not provide a modular
separation between the adaptation engine and the managed system. Embedding the
adaptation logic within the managed system components increases the complexity in the
development process of a self-adaptive software system. This also limits the reusability of
the work achieved in one application to other applications or domains.

David C. Wyld et al. (Eds) : CST, ITCS, JSE, SIP, ARIA, DMS - 2014
pp. 173–181, 2014. © CS & IT-CSCP 2014

DOI : 10.5121/csit.2014.4117

174

Computer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT)

•

Run-time uncertainty handling: Uncertainty is a challenge that exists not only in selfadaptive software systems but also in the entire software engineering field on different
levels. Therefore managing uncertainty is an essential issue in constructing a selfadaptive software system as uncertainty hinders the adaptation process if it is not handled
and diminished.

•

Adaptation space: The adaptation process raises a performance challenge if the
adaptation space is relatively large, particularly when new adaptations are required to be
inferred. This challenge requires an efficient mechanism that guarantees learning new
adaptations as well as providing the adaptation with satisfactory performance. This means
that the adaptation engine's response should be provided as soon as an adaptation is
issued since late adaptations provided by the adaptation engine could be futile.

The rest of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 lists the related work and the existing
gabs in the literature. Section 3 shows the expected contributions of our research and Section4
describesour proposed solution and its model. Section 5 and Section 6 contains the progress and
the future of our research, in particular the evaluation. This paper concludes in Section 7.

2. RELATED WORK
The body of literature in the area of self-adaptivity has provideda plethora of frameworks,
approaches and techniques to enhance self-adaptivity that is widespread in many fields.This
section contains the related work to our research. In the following sections, we will present the
related work categorized according to the mechanisms used to support self-adaptivity.

2.1 Learning based adaptation
Salehie and Tahvildari [2] proposed a framework for realizing the deciding process performed by
an external adaptation engine. They usedknowledge base to capture the managed system's
information namely domain information, goals and utility information. This is used in the
decision-making algorithm, as they name it, which is responsible for providing the adaptation
decision. In [5], Kim and Park provided a reinforcement learning-based approach for architecturebased self-managed software using both on-line and off-line learning. FUSION [6], was proposed
by Elkhodary et al. to solve the problem of foreseeing the changes in environment, which hinders
the adaptation during run time for feature-based systems using a machine learning technique. In
[7], Mohamed-Hedi et al. provided a self-healing approach to enhance the reliability of web
services.A simple experiment was used to validate their approach without empirical evidence.

2.2 Architecture & model based adaptation
RAINBOW [8] is a famous contribution in the area of self-adaptation based on architectural
infrastructures reuse. RAINBOW monitors the managed system using abstract architectural
models to detect any constraints violation. GRAF [9] was proposed for engineering self-adaptive
software systems. The communication between the managed system and GRAF framework is
carried out via interfaces. This approach has a performance overhead because GRAF reproduces a
new adaptable version of the managed system. Similar to GRAF [9] Vogel and Giese [10]
assumed that adaptation can be performed in two ways, parameter adaptation and structural
adaptation. They provided three steps to resolve structural adaptation and used a self-healing web
application as an example. Morin et al. [11] presented an architectural based approach for
realizing software adaptivity using model-driven and aspect oriented techniques. The aim of this
approach was to reduce the complexities of the system by providing architectural adaptation
based solution. They provided model-oriented architectures and aspect models for feature


175

designing and selection. Khakpour et al. [12] provided PobSAM, a model-based approach that is
used to monitor, control and adapt the system behaviour using LTL to check the correctness of
adaptation. Asadollahi et al.[13] presented StarMX framework for realizing self-management for
Java-based applications. In their work they provided so called autonomic manager, which is an
adaptation engine that encapsulates the adaptation logic. Adaptation logic was implemented by
arbitrary policy-rule language. StarMX uses JMX and policy engines to enable self-management.
Policies were used to represent the adaptation behaviour. This framework is restricted to Javabased application as the definition of processes is carried out by implementing certain Java
interfaces in the policy manager. They evaluated their framework against some quality attribute.
However, their evaluation for quality attributes was not quantified quantitatively.The work in [14]
provided a new formal language for representing self-adaptivity for architecture-based selfadaptation. This language was used as an extension of the RAINBOW framework [8]. This work
explains the use of this new language using an adaptation selection example that incorporate
some stakeholders' interests in the selection process of the provided service which represents the
adaptive service.Bontchev et al. [15] provides a software engine for adaptable process controlling
and adaptable web-based delivered content. Their work reuses the functionality of the existing
component in order to realize self-adaptivity in architecture-based systems. This work contains
only the proposed solution and the implementation without experiment and evaluation.

2.3 Middleware based adaptation
In [16], a prototype for seat adaptation was provided. This prototype uses a middleware to support
an adaptive behaviour. This approach was restricted to the seat adaptation which is controlled by
a software system. Adapta framework [17] was presented as a middleware that enabled selfadaptivity for components in distributed applications. The monitoring service in Adapta
monitored both hardware and software changes.

2.4 Fuzzy control based adaptation
Yang et al. [18] proposed a fuzzy-based self-adaptive software framework. The framework has
three layers: (1) Adaptation logic layer, (2) Adaptable system layer, which is the managed system
and (3) Software Bus. The adaptation logic layer represents the adaptation engine that includes
the fuzzy rule-base, fuzzification and de-fuzzification components. This framework has a set of
design steps in order to implement the adaptation. POISED [19] introduced a probabilistic
approach for handling uncertainty in self-adaptive software systems by providing positive and
negative impacts of uncertainty. An evaluation experiment had been applied which showed that
POISED provided an accepted adaptation decision under uncertainty. The limitations of this
approach are that it handles only internal uncertainty and does not memorize and utilize previous
adaptation decisions.

2.5 Programming framework based adaptation
Narebdra et al. [20] proposed programming model and run time architecture for implementing
adaptive service oriented. It was done via a middleware that solves the problem of static binding
of services. The adaptation space in this work is limited to three situations that require adaptation
of services. MOSES approach was proposed in the work [21] to provide self-adaptivity for SOA
systems. The authors used linear programming problem for formulating and solving the adaptivity
problem as a model-based framework. MOSES aimed to improve the QoS for SOA, and the work
in [21] provides a numerical experiment to test their approach. QoSMOS [22] provided a toolsupported framework to improve the QoS for the service based systems in adaptive and predictive
manner.The work in [23] provided an implementation of architecture-based self-adaptive
software using aspect oriented programming. They used a web-based system as an experiment to

176


test their implementation. Their experiment showed that the response time of the self-adaptive
implementation is better than the original implementation without a self-adaptivity mechanism.
Liu and Parashar [24] provided Accord, which is a programming framework that facilitates
realizing self-adaptivity in self-managed applications. The usage of this framework was
illustrated using forest fire management application.
Table 1, which is similar to what proposed in [4] , summarizes the related work done in this
research. The table has two aspects of comparison (1) Research aspects and (2) Self-adaptivity
aspect. The earlier aspect is important and represent an indication regarding the maturity and
creditability of the research. The later aspect is related to the topic of this paper.
Table 1: Summary of related work

3. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION
In this research, we realize self-adaptivity in software system by providing an external adaptation
engine which reduces the changes in the managed system and subsequently in the entire selfadaptive system. Our approach utilizes Case-based Reasoning (CBR) [25] as an external
adaptation engine in order to overcome the aforementioned challenges. Specifically, this research
proposes a framework that we claim it addresses the following challenges:
•

Separating the managed system and the adaptation engine in a modular fashion in order
to overcome the drawbacks of embedding the self-adaptivity logic within the managed
system. This idea is one of the key ideas in the IBM autonomic element [26] which
suggests a modular separation between the managed system and the adaptation engine.

•

Managing the complexity of adaptation space by remembering the previously achieved
adaptations stored in a knowledge base, which improves the performance of the


177

adaptation process.The remembrance supports not only the complexity of the adaptation
space, but also the performance of the adaptation engine. That is because recalling
already existing adaption is better than constructing it from scratch in terms of
performance.
•

Handling the run-time uncertainty that appears in the adaptation process due to the
managed system's environment changes or our framework's internal model. We utilize
and incorporate the probability theory and the utility functions as proposed in [27].

4. PROPOSED SOLUTION
In this section, an overview of our proposed solution will be presented. Figure 1 shows a
reference model of our solution that will be described in the following sections.

4.1. External adaptation engine
The adaptation engine containsan adaptation mediator, which is responsible for:
•

Monitoring the managed system by reading its attributes to decide whether an adaptation
is required or not. We suppose that the managed system provides a service with overall
utility U. If U is below or is approaching a predefined utility threshold i.e. "UT", then the
monitoring unit issues an adaptation process. The adaptation request is the set of the
managed system attribute values at the time of issuing the adaptation. Consequently, the
adaptation request is sent to the adaptation engine to perform the adaptation process.

•

Executing the adaptation response received by the adaptation engine. The adaptation
response is the result of the adaptation process performed by the adaptation engine, which
is the corrective state to be applied on the managed system.

In addition to the adaptation mediator, the adaptation engine embraces a Case-based reasoning
engine. Typically, CBR life cycle consists of four stages:
1. Retrieve: The CBR system retrieves the most similar case(s) from the Knowledge Base (KB)
by applying the similarity measures on the request case.
2. Reuse (Adapt): In this stage, CBR employs the information of the retrievedcases. If the
retrieved cases are not sufficient in themselves to solve the query case, the CBR engine
adapts this/these case/s to generate a new solution. Some of the common techniques for
reusing and adapting the retrieved knowledge are introduced in [28]. Our approach uses
Generative Adaptation [29], which requires some heuristics e.g. utility functions, to provide
an efficient adaptation process.
3. Revise: A revision of the new solution is important to make sure that it satisfiesthe goals of
the managed system. Revision process can be done by applying the adaptation response to
real world, evaluate it by the domain expert or by simulation approaches.

178


Figure 1: Reference modle for the proposed solution

4. Retain: In this stage, the new generated cases are saved in the knowledge base. Case-Based
Learning (CBL) have been introduced in [30] to provide algorithms and approaches for the
retain process.
In our model, the case is a set of attributes that represents the attributes of the managed system.
For example, if one attribute of the managed system causes a UT break, then the adaptation
engine should alter the value of this attribute in order to provide the required utility.In our
solution we incorporate the utility functions for capturing the requirements of the managed
system. Also, utility function is used to judge the quality of the cases stored in the KB and
generated by the adaptation engine.
Algorithm 1 abstracts the adaptation process of our solution, where β is a predefined level of the
accepted similarity and QAF is the qualified adaptation frame, a set of cases that have the
potential to be used directly as an adaptation response or as basis for adaptation.Case Expediency
is a measure for the usefulness of a case, and this measure uses the similarity of the case beside its
utility.


179

Algorithm 1: Adaptation process algorithm
A

4.2.Uncertainty quantification
Uncertainty
We follow the uncertainty quantification approach in [31], where uncertainty has three
inty
dimensions:
•

The Location of uncertainty: Where the uncertainty manifests in the system.

•

The Level of uncertainty: A variation between deterministic level and total ignorance.
This means that uncertainty about one attribute of the system can take a value between
one and zero.

•

The Nature of uncertainty: Whether the cause of uncertainty is variability or lack of
knowledge in the uncertainty meant attribute of the system.

Based on [32], uncertainty in self-adaptive software systems can be found in three places,
self
an
namely: System requirement, system design and architecture, and run-time. In our solution, we
,
run
focused on run-time uncertainty by quantifying it based on the aforesaid three dimensions.
dimension

5. PROGRESS AND CURRENT STATUS
A prototypical implementation of the solution has been done. This implementation includes the
integration of the CBR engine with utility functions. The implementation also includes the
generative adaptation of the adaptation responses. Moreover, uncertainty analysis and
quantification are provided in this implementation paving the way for handling uncertainty during
run-time. The three dimensions of the uncertainty [31] has been modelled and implemented.
e

180


6. FUTURE DIRECTION AND EVALUATION
For future direction, firstly, we will use a case study to empirically evaluate and validate our
approach. The case study i.e. the managed system, should require the self-adaptivity mechanism
that performs well under run-time uncertainty. Secondly, we will evaluate the results of the case
study application. The evaluation will be based on software quality metrics and GQM [33]. We
expect that the experimentation of our solution will provide a positive potential results for both
handling the uncertainty and the complexity of adaptation space. However, we do not have a clue
regarding the response time of the adaptation engine, the results will reveal this issue.

7. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have presented our research for realizing self-adaptivity in software systems. We
started by showing the gabs in the research and the expected contributions of the research. Also,
we have presented details about the solution model and the used technology, Case-based
reasoning. The progress of the work was presented along with the future directions. This paper
ended with our vision of the evaluation process of the solution.

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AUTHOR
Mohammed Abufouda received the BSc. in Computer Engineering from Islamic University, Palestine in
2006 and the MSc. degree in computer science from Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, in
2013. He is a PhD candidate at Technical University of Kaiserslautern in computer science department. His
research interests includes software engineering and complex system analysis.

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