Design Patterns for Self-Adaptive RTE Systems Specification

Abstract

The development of self-adaptive real-time embedded (RTE) systems is an increasingly hard task due to the growing complexity of both hardware and software and the high variability of the execution environment. Different approaches, platforms, and middleware have been proposed in the field, from low to high abstraction level. However, there is still a lack of generic and reusable designs for self-adaptive RTE systems that fit different system domains, lighten designers’ task, and decrease development cost. In this paper, we propose five design patterns for self-adaptive RTE systems modeling resulting from the generalization of relevant existing adaptation-related works. Combined together, the patterns form the design of an adaptation loop composed of five adaptation modules. The proposed solution offers a modular, reusable, and flexible specification of these modules and enables the separation of concerns. It also permits dealing with concurrency, real-time features, and adaptation cost relative to the adaptation activities. To validate our solution, we applied it to a complex case study, a cross-layer self-adaptive object tracking system, to show patterns utilization and prove the solution benefits.

Self-adaptation approaches for energy efficiency

“…Architecture modeling approaches introduce reference architectures that guide software architects in building self-adaptive software systems. The design patterns proposed by Said et al for self-adaptive real-time embedded systems fall under this category of approaches [21]. Our analysis show that the proposed reference architectures mostly adopt a layered architectural style.…”

Design Patterns for Self Adaptive Systems Engineering

“…Iftikhar and Weyns [14] propose ActiveFORMS, short for Active Formal Models, which contributes to the self adaptive systems with an approach that guarantees the verified adaptation behavior at design time and provides support for dealing with dynamic goals at runtime. Ben Said et al [1] proposed a set of design patterns targeting the real time systems. Iglesia [15] in his PhD thesis proposed and modeled the semantics for a set of MAPE-K formal templates for the design of self adaptive systems.…”

An Investigation of the Monitoring Activity in Self Adaptive Systems

“…A considerable number of research papers has been published in which many approaches and paradigms have been proposed to design and develop self adaptive systems. Such approaches can be classified into many different areas of software engineering such as requirements engineering [4], design patterns [5,6] software architecture [7,8,9] and component-based development [10]. Each approach has tackled the problem from a different aspect and suggested its solution accordingly.…”