Reconciling White-Box and Black-Box Perspectives on Behavioral Self-adaptation

Abstract

Abstract. This paper propose to reconcile two perspectives on behavioural adaptation commonly taken at different stages of the engineering of autonomic computing systems. Requirements engineering activities often take a black-box perspective: A system is considered to be adaptive with respect to an environment whenever the system is able to satisfy its goals irrespectively of the environment disturbations. Modelling and programming engineering activities often take a white-box perspective: A system is equipped with suitable adaptation mechanisms and its behaviour is classified as adaptive depending on whether the adaptation mechanisms are enacted or not. The proposed approach reconciles black-and white-box perspectives by proposing several notions of coherence between the adaptivity as observed by the two perspectives: These notions provide useful criteria for the system developer to assess and possibly modify the adaptation requirements, models and programs of an autonomic system.

Past, Present and Future of Behaviourally Adaptive Engineered Systems

“…On the other hand, open self-adaptive systems induce a lot of theoretical, computational, and behavioural issues. As observed byBruni et al (2015), the requirements engineering for closed systems typically happens in…”