A Problem Oriented Approach to Modeling Feedback Loops for Self-Adaptive Software Systems

Self-adaptive software systems can adjust their behaviors at runtime to respond to the context changes. To operationalize the adaptive mechanism, feedback loops have been advocated in many works. However, most of existing works focus on the architecture design to realize the feedback loops. How to model the required feedback loops remains an issue. In this paper, we propose a problem oriented approach for this issue. This approach models the system composed by the self-adaptive software and its context as an adaptive control system which is equipped with two kinds of feedback loops: context-aware feedback loops and requirements-aware feedback loops. To model the feedback loops, we identify five classes of software problems to address the different concerns of the adaptive requirements behind the feedback loops. We illustrate our idea by applying it to a cruise control system.