Hints to Address Concurrency in Self-Managed Systems at the Architectural Level - A Case Study

Self-managed systems are able to perform changes by themselves on themselves during their execution due to variations occurred internally or in their execution environment. Current solutions for self-managed systems address one change at a time. In the real world, two or more changes may raise contemporaneously. Hence, they should be addressed concurrently and not sequentially. This would improve the overall performances of a system and would avoid delays in addressing changes. In this paper, we propose architecture level mechanisms to address concurrency in self-managed systems. We investigate available concurrency solutions used in non self-managed systems and adopt and adapt them for self-managed systems. We also introduce novel concepts such as: adaptation zone, adaptation need, and adaptation level. To apply and validate our solution a case study in a Web banking context has been developed.