Abstract
Self-adaptive systems (SAS) can modify their behavior during execution; this modification is done because of change in internal or external environment. The need for self-adaptive software systems has increased tremendously in last decade due to ever changing user requirements, improvement in technology and need for building software that reacts to user preferences. To build this type of software we need well establish models that have the flexibility to adjust to the new requirements and make sure that the adaptation is efficient and reliable. Feedback loop has proven to be very effective in modeling and developing SAS, these loops help the system to sense, analyze, plan, test and execute the adaptive behavior at runtime. Formal methods are well defined, rigorous and reliable mathematical techniques that can be effectively used to reason and specify behavior of SAS at design and run-time. Agents can play an important role in modeling SAS because they can work independently, with other agents and with environment as well. Using agents to perform individual steps in feedback loop and formalizing these agents using Petri nets will not only increase the reliability, but also, the adaptation can be performed efficiently for taking decisions at run time with increased confidence. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent framework to model self-adaptive systems using agent based modeling. This framework will help the researchers in implementation of SAS, which is more dependable, reliable, autonomic and flexible because of use of multi-agent based formal approach.
Highlights
As the complexity has increased, existing approaches do not suffice the requirements of modeling, managing and developing software systems
In this paper we propose an initial architecture of the system that will use the strengths and rigor of formal methods, autonomous working of agents and the effectiveness of feedback loop to model a self-adaptive system [14]
This research has two major contributions, firstly we have proposed an integration of formal methods, agent based modeling and Self-adaptive systems (SAS) for successfully analyzing, testing and implementing the systems that have the capability to adapt at run time
Summary
As the complexity has increased, existing approaches do not suffice the requirements of modeling, managing and developing software systems. In this paper we propose an initial architecture of the system that will use the strengths and rigor of formal methods, autonomous working of agents and the effectiveness of feedback loop to model a self-adaptive system [14]. This model will further be extended for distributed systems where most of the components will be reused with some additional components like distributed feedback loop manager, distributed agent manager and distributed application manager will be added.
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