Non-expert Level Analysis of Self-adaptive Systems

Self-adaptivity is mainly used to address uncertainties, unpredicted events, as well as to automate administration tasks. It allows systems to change themselves while executing in order to address expected or unexpected changes and to adapt as much as possible to the current execution context. Self-adaptivity is particularly meaningful for dynamic application domains such as Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), service oriented based solutions (SOA), cloud computing, robotics, among many others. There are various available solutions in these domains that exploit self-adaptivity. The question is how can we analyze them to understand how self-adaptivity is implemented and exploited in order to use and re-use, as well as to adapt existing solutions to new or other systems? In this paper, we propose a first step in this direction, by analyzing available self-adaptive systems (and especially their self-adaptive mechanisms) in various application domains using the Understand tool - widely used for software development, analysis, and quality assessment.