Abstract
Self-adaptive systems are software-intensive systems endowed with the ability to respond to a variety of changes that may occur in their environment, goals, or the system itself by adapting their structure and behaviour at run-time in an autonomous way. Controllers are complex components incorporated in self-adaptive systems, which are crucial to their function since they are in charge of adapting the target system by executing actions through effectors, based on information monitored by probes. However, although controllers are becoming critical in many application domains, so far very little has been done to assess their robustness. In this paper, we propose an approach for evaluating the robustness of controllers for self-adaptive software systems, aiming to identify faults in their design. Our proposal considers the stateful nature of the controller and identifies a set of robustness tests, which includes the provision of mutated inputs to the interfaces between the controller and the target system (i.e. probes). The feasibility of the approach is evaluated on Rainbow, a framework for architecture-based self-adaptation, and in the context of the Znn.com case study.
Highlights
One of the main traits of a self-adaptive software system, compared to any other kind of system, is its ability to deliver its services in spite of changes that may occur in the system, its environment, or even in its goals
These types of failures have not been identified during our tests, these are still needed since they portray relevant behaviours of the controller
The approach consists in mutating the inputs provided by probes to the controller, according to a set of mutation rules and a target system’s changeload, and taking into account the stateful nature of the controller
Summary
One of the main traits of a self-adaptive software system, compared to any other kind of system, is its ability to deliver its services in spite of changes that may occur in the system, its environment, or even in its goals. In the context of complex software systems, these controllers typically implement the traditional sense-planact architectures An example of such controllers is the MAPE-K model, which includes four distinct operational stages, namely monitoring, analysis, planning, and execution [2]. The present paper describes an approach for evaluating the robustness of controllers for self-adaptive systems by abstracting away, in a first instance, from the state of the target system being controlled. The rationale behind this is the fact that the complexity associated with these controllers is such that we need first to devise novel means for evaluating the core logic that enables adaptation, before exploring the ensemble target system plus controller. The ‘Testing procedure’ section provides further details about the Rainbow framework, which is used for the experimental validation of our approach
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