A Context-Aware Software Adaptation Framework

对于在运行时响应于变化而动态地调整其行为的软件系统的需求日益增加。这些系统的研究已经进行了两个社区的研究人员有两个不同的重点：自适应和上下文意识。一方面，上下文感知的研究更多地关注如何对上下文信息进行建模、处理和管理，但局限于系统如何适应上下文信息中的意外变化。另一方面，自适应性的研究更多的是关于如何适应系统的结构和/或行为，以响应需求和/或上下文的变化（可能是意外的变化），较少关注上下文如何建模，处理和管理。在实践中，两者之间的界限是相当模糊的，一个上下文感知的自适应系统的工程需要考虑这两个方面的系统。 本研究的目的是调查，设计和开发一个新的框架，以确定考虑上下文感知和自适应的综合方式的要求。首先，该框架提供了一种新颖的上下文建模技术，可以捕获所有的系统环境方面，并支持软件执行过程中的后续适应和演化;其次，它维护了多个系统模型（即结构，行为和质量模型）及其在运行时的一致性，并使系统运行时进化;第三，它提供了适应机制，可以科普意外的环境变化，使用系统上下文关系。 我们认为，该项目对目标经济部门的好处是双重的。首先，它提供了一个上级上下文感知框架，这将有助于开发和实现复杂的算法和方法，以实现系统运行时的自适应性。其次，我们相信，我们旨在为自适应应用开发的特定建模技术将帮助工业公司有效地采用方法，以便自适应系统在其演化和维护过程中保持最新。

There is an increasing demand for software systems that dynamically adapt their behavior at runtime in response to changes. Research into these systems has been conducted by researchers from two communities with two different emphases: self-adaptivity and context-awareness. On one hand, research in context-awareness is more concerned with how to model, process, and manage the context information but limited on how a system adapts itself in response to unanticipated changes in the context information. On the other hand, research in self-adaptivity is more about how to adapt the system's structure and/or behavior in response to requirements and/or context changes (possibly unanticipated changes), with less attention to how context is modeled, processed, and managed. In practice, the line between the two is rather blurred, and the engineering of a context-aware adaptive system needs to consider both aspects in a systematic manner. The objective of this research project is to investigate, design, and develop a novel framework to identify the requirements of considering context-awareness and self-adaptivity in an integrated manner. First, the framework provides a novel context modeling technique that captures all the system environment aspects and supports later adaptation and evolution during the software execution; second it maintains multiple system models (i.e. the structure, behavior and quality models) and their consistency at runtime, and enables system runtime evolution; and third it provides adaptation mechanisms that can cope with unanticipated environment changes using the system-context relationships. We believe that the benefit of this project to the targeted sectors of the economy is twofold. First, it provides a superior context-aware framework that will help to develop and implement sophisticated algorithms and methods for system runtime adaptivity. Second, we believe the particular modeling techniques we aim at developing for adaptive applications will help industrial companies to effectively employ methods so that the adaptive systems can be kept up-to-date during their evolution and maintenance.