Coordinated actor model of self-adaptive track-based traffic control systems

Abstract

Self-adaptation is a well-known technique to handle growing complexities of software systems, where a system autonomously adapts itself in response to changes in a dynamic and unpredictable environment. With the increasing need for developing self-adaptive systems, providing a model and an implementation platform to facilitate integration of adaptation mechanisms into the systems and assuring their safety and quality is crucial. In this paper, we target Track-based Traffic Control Systems (TTCSs) in which the traffic flows through pre-specified sub-tracks and is coordinated by a traffic controller. We introduce a coordinated actor model to design self-adaptive TTCSs and provide a general mapping between various TTCSs and the coordinated actor model. The coordinated actor model is extended to build large-scale self-adaptive TTCSs in a decentralized setting. We also discuss the benefits of using Ptolemy II as a framework for model-based development of large-scale self-adaptive systems that supports designing multiple hierarchical MAPE-K feedback loops interacting with each other. We propose a template based on the coordinated actor model to design a self-adaptive TTCS in Ptolemy II that can be instantiated for various TTCSs. We enhance the proposed template with a predictive adaptation feature. We illustrate applicability of the coordinated actor model and consequently the proposed template by designing two real-life case studies in the domains of air traffic control systems and railway traffic control systems in Ptolemy II.