Abstract
Self-adaptive approaches are a promising to address the dynamic and uncertain nature of the environments where today’s complex systems operate. In particular, systems operating in military environments, during crises or under unexpected conditions need to address critical concerns related to resource sparsity and the unstable and uncertain nature of exchanged information. Despite a plethora of self-adaptive and autonomic approaches proposed in the last decade, very few have been designed for or evaluated in contested environments , where adversarial action in the communications domain leads to stale or incomplete information, or in resource-constrained environments, where resources are either limited or required by a large number of components. These conditions are where self-adaptability to aid human operators is needed the most. To better understand self-adaptation in contested and resource-constrained environments, we conducted a systematic literature review of publications over the last decade. We conduct our review through the lens of a military environment, where contention, both physical and from a resource, be it computational or communication based is at its peak. We followed the systematic literature review methodology and analysed 238 primary studies. We identified that the most frequent application domains are those where failures are frequent and costly, namely, cloud computing, web services and applications, and servers. Despite this, less than 3% of the papers considered constrained resources and stale or incomplete information and a significant focus was on developing centralised solutions instead of distributed ones throughout all papers. Very few papers (4.6%) considered environments where the information about the system components was not readily available. No papers evaluated the systems running in contested and resource-constrained environments. We present an analysis of the self-adaptive systems that consider incomplete or stale information and constrained resources, discuss their limitations and identify future areas of research. Critical research gaps include the lack of evaluation of self-adaptive approaches, including the lack of standards or formalisms to allow for the comparison of various approaches. In addition, there is a need to consider more self-* properties and non-functional requirements in order to make sure the designed system is resilient. This paper presents our review findings in detail, examines how self-adaptation happens in contested and resource-constrained environments, and discusses the identified research gaps.
Highlights
Self-adaptation is recognised as one of the most effective approaches to manage and improve current large-scale dynamic software systems [1]–[3] that have increasingly complex requirements
Our analysis identified over 30 application domains, as shown in Table 2, where we list under ‘Other’ application domains that appear only once, namely, electronics, simultaneous multi-threading processors, task scheduling, data processing, sandboxing, spacecraft and weapons systems
Existing software environments are prone to attacks or failures, resulting in poor availability of information about all system components
Summary
Self-adaptation is recognised as one of the most effective approaches to manage and improve current large-scale dynamic software systems [1]–[3] that have increasingly complex requirements. Despite the prevalence of self-adaptive solutions in domains such as cloud computing [4], [5], web servers [6], [7] and wireless networks [8], [9], where faults and failures are ubiquitous and costly [10]–[12], few existing solutions operate in environments with constrained resources and/or where complete system information is not current and reliable. Szabo et al.: Self-Adaptive Software Systems in CRC Environments: Overview and Challenges resources and unreliable information sources can be found in military land-based operations, where the potential benefits of using self-adaptive systems are significant [13], [14]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
