A Formal Model to Integrate Behavioral and Structural Adaptations in Self-adaptive Systems

Abstract

An approach for modelling adaptive complex systems should be flexible and scalable to allow a system to grow easily, and should have a formal foundation to guarantee the correctness of the system behavior. In this paper, we present the architecture, and formal syntax and semantics of HPobSAM which is a model for specifying behavioral and structural adaptations to model large-scale systems and address reusability concerns. Self-adaptive modules are used as the building blocks to structure a system, and policies are used as the mechanism to perform both behavioral and structural adaptations. While a self-adaptive module is autonomous to achieve its local goals by collaborating with other self-adaptive modules, it is controlled by a higher-level entity to prevent undesirable behavior. HPobSAM is formalized using a combination of algebraic, graph transformation-based and actor-based formalisms.