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Continually verify self-adaptation decisions taken by critical software in response to changes in the operating environment.

Abstract-Building on concepts drawn from control theory, self-adaptive software handles environmental and internal uncertainties by dynamically adjusting its architecture and parameters in response to events such as workload changes and component failures. Self-adaptive software is increasingly expected to meet strict functional and non-functional requirements in applications from areas as diverse as manufacturing, healthcare and finance. To address this need, we introduce a methodology for the systematic ENgineering of TRUstworthy Self-adaptive sofTware (ENTRUST). ENTRUST uses a combination of (1) design-time and runtime modelling and verification, and (2) industry-adopted assurance processes to develop trustworthy self-adaptive software and assurance cases arguing the suitability of the software for its intended application. To evaluate the effectiveness of our methodology, we present a tool-supported instance of ENTRUST and its use to develop proof-of-concept self-adaptive software for embedded and service-based systems from the oceanic monitoring and e-finance domains, respectively. The experimental results show that ENTRUST can be used to engineer self-adaptive software systems in different application domains and to generate dynamic assurance cases for these systems.

The reductionism behind today's software-engineering methods breaks down in the face of systems complexity.

Formal verification is used to establish the compliance of software and hardware systems with important classes of requirements. System compliance with functional requirements is frequently analysed using techniques such as model checking, and theorem proving. In addition, a technique called quantitative verification supports the analysis of the reliability, performance, and other quality-of-service (QoS) properties of systems that exhibit stochastic behaviour. In this paper, we extend the applicability of quantitative verification to the common scenario when the probabilities of transition between some or all states of the Markov models analysed by the technique are unknown, but observations of these transitions are available. To this end, we introduce a theoretical framework, and a tool chain that establish confidence intervals for the QoS properties of a software system modelled as a Markov chain with uncertain transition probabilities. We use two case studies from different application domains to assess the effectiveness of the new quantitative verification technique. Our experiments show that disregarding the above source of uncertainty may significantly affect the accuracy of the verification results, leading to wrong decisions, and low-quality software systems.

The software underpinning today's IT systems needs to adapt dynamically and predictably to rapid changes in system workload, environment and objectives. We describe a software framework that achieves such adaptiveness for IT systems whose components can be modelled as Markov chains. The framework comprises (i) an autonomic architecture that uses Markov-chain quantitative analysis to dynamically adjust the parameters of an IT system in line with its state, environment and objectives; and (ii) a method for developing instances of this architecture for real-world systems. Two case studies are presented that use the framework successfully for the dynamic power management of disk drives, and for the adaptive management of cluster availability within data centres, respectively.

We present a tool-supported framework for the efficient reverification of component-based software systems after changes such as additions, removals or modifications of components. The incremental verification engine at the core of our INcremental VErification STrategy (INVEST) framework uses high-level algebraic representations of component-based systems to identify and execute the minimal set of componentwise reverification steps after a system change. The generality of the INVEST engine allows its integration with existing assume-guarantee verification paradigms. We illustrate this integration for an existing technique for the assumeguarantee verification of probabilistic systems. The resulting instance of the INVEST framework can reverify probabilistic safety properties of a cloud-deployed software system in a fraction of the time required by compositional assumeguarantee verification alone.

Abstract-Research on adaptive and self-managing systems is hindered by a lack of prototypical applications that researchers could use to evaluate and compare new methods, techniques and tools. To address this limitation, we introduce a reference implementation of a Tele Assistance System (TAS) for research on self-adaptation in the domain of service-based systems. Our TAS exemplar of service-based systems comes with pre-defined scenarios for comparing the effectiveness of different self-adaptation solutions. Other researchers can easily exploit the underlying service platform, reusable components and development method we devised for TAS to speed up the engineering of additional research exemplars for service-based systems.