  Championed by IBM's vision of autonomic computing paper in 2003, the
autonomic computing research field has seen increased research activity over
the last 20 years. Several conferences (SEAMS, SASO, ICAC) and workshops
(SISSY) have been established and have contributed to the autonomic computing
knowledge base in search of a new kind of system -- a self-adaptive system
(SAS). These systems are characterized by being context-aware and can act on
that awareness. The actions carried out could be on the system or on the
context (or environment). The underlying goal of a SAS is the sustained
achievement of its goals despite changes in its environment. Despite a number
of literature reviews on specific aspects of SASs ranging from their
requirements to quality attributes, we lack a systematic understanding of the
current state of the art. This paper contributes a systematic literature review
into self-adaptive systems using the dblp computer science bibliography as a
database. We filtered the records systematically in successive steps to arrive
at 293 relevant papers. Each paper was critically analyzed and categorized into
an attribute matrix. This matrix consisted of five categories, with each
category having multiple attributes. The attributes of each paper, along with
the summary of its contents formed the basis of the literature review that
spanned 30 years (1990-2020). We characterize the maturation process of the
research area from theoretical papers over practical implementations to more
holistic and generic approaches, frameworks, and exemplars, applied to areas
such as networking, web services, and robotics, with much of the recent work
focusing on IoT and IaaS.
