Using Product Lines Techniques to Specify Self-Adaptative Systems

Abstract

Dynamic software adaptability is one of the central features leveraged by autonomic computing. However, developing software that changes its behavior at run time in response to dynamically varying user needs and resource constraints is a challenging task. With the emergence of mobile and service oriented computing, such variation is becoming increasingly common, and the need for adaptivity is increasing accordingly. Software product line engineering has proved itself as an efficient way to deal with varying user needs and resource constraints. In this paper we present an approach to specifying adaptive systems based on product line oriented technique such as variability modeling: we propose to combine goal modeling techniques to represent architectural and environmental variability, with constraint programming to provide the analyst with a means to identify the system variants best suited to the various environmental contexts that a system might encounter at runtime.