An architecture-based approach to self-adaptive software

CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING SCEnario. A fleet of unmanned air vehicles undertakes a mission to disable an enemy airfield. Pre-mission intelligence indicates that the airfield is not defended, and mission planning proceeds accordingly. While the UAVs are en route to the target, new intelligence indicates that a mobile surface-to-air missile launcher now guards the airfield. The UAVs autonomously replan their mission, dividing into two groups—a SAM-suppression unit and an airfield-suppression unit—and proceed to accomplish their objectives. During the flight, specialized algorithms for detecting and recognizing SAM launchers automatically upload and are integrated into the SAM-suppression unit’s software. In this scenario, new software components are dynamically inserted into fielded, heterogeneous systems without requiring system restart, or indeed, any downtime. Mission replanning relies on analyses that include feedback from current performance. Furthermore, such replanning can take place autonomously, can involve multiple, distributed, cooperating planners, and where major changes are demanded and require human approval or guidance, can cooperate with mission analysts. Throughout, system integrity requires the assurance of consistency, correctness, and coordination of changes. Other applications for fleets of UAVs might include environment and land-use monitoring, freeway-traffic management, fire fighting, airborne cellular-telephone relay stations, and damage surveys in times of natural disaster. How wasteful to construct afresh a specific software platform for each new UAV application! Far better if software architects can simply adapt the platform to the application at hand, and better yet, if the platform itself adapts on demand even while serving some other purpose. For example, an irborne sensor platform designed for environmental and land-use monitoring could prove useful for damage surveys following an earthquake or hurricane, provided someone could change the software quickly enough and with sufficient assurance that the new system would perform as intended. Software engineering aims for the systematic, principled design and deployment of applications that fulfill software’s original promise—applications that retain full plasticity throughout their lifecycle and that are as easy to modify in the field as they are on the drawing board. Software engineers have pursued many techniques for achieving this goal: specification languages, high-level programming languages, and object-oriented analysis and design, to name just a few. However, while each contributes to the goal, the sum total still falls short. Self-adaptive software will provide the key. Many disciplines will contribute to its progress, but wholesale advances require a sysSELF-ADAPTIVE SOFTWARE REQUIRES HIGH DEPENDABILITY, ROBUSTNESS, ADAPTABILITY, AND AVAILABILITY. THIS ARTICLE DESCRIBES AN INFRASTRUCTURE SUPPORTING TWO SIMULTANEOUS PROCESSES IN SELF-ADAPTIVE SOFTWARE: SYSTEM EVOLUTION, THE CONSISTENT APPLICATION OF CHANGE OVER TIME, AND SYSTEM ADAPTATION, THE CYCLE OF DETECTING CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES AND PLANNING AND DEPLOYING RESPONSIVE MODIFICATIONS.