Foreword

SEAMS 2012, the 7th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems, was held on June 4-5, 2012 in Zurich, Switzerland. As in previous years SEAMS is co-located with the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The increasing complexity, distribution, and dynamism of many software-intensive systems impose self-managing capabilities as key requirements. These systems must be able to adapt themselves at runtime to cope with changes in operating environments, variability of resources, new user needs, intrusions, or faults. The goal is to preserve effective, secure, and safe operation and react to changes with no (or limited) human intervention. Solutions to complement software systems with self-managing and self-adaptive capabilities have been proposed by researchers in many different areas, including software architecture, fault-tolerant computing, robotics, control systems, programming languages, runtime program analysis and verification, and biologically-inspired computing. The SEAMS Symposium focuses on the software engineering aspects, including the methods, techniques, and tools that can be used to support self-adaptive, self-managing, self-healing, selfoptimizing, and self-configuring software systems. The objective of the SEAMS Symposium is to bring together researchers and practitioners from many diverse areas to investigate, discuss, and examine thoroughly the fundamental principles, state of the art, and critical challenges of self-adaptive and self-managing systems. This second year of SEAMS as a symposium continues to attract researchers and practitioners from the different disciplines interested in self-adaptive systems. We received 50 submissions, and after a thorough review process - each paper was reviewed by at least three program committee members - accepted 14 full papers and 5 short papers. The SEAMS 2012 program comprises two keynotes, presentations of the 19 technical paper- , a panel on runtime validation and verification, and short reports on on-going activities in the self-adaptive systems community. The invited presentations feature two key research topics of self-adaptive systems. The technical papers cover many different aspects of self-adaptive systems. Authors analyze and summarize existing systems and literature in the form of taxonomies and reference models and address requirements elicitation as well as design and validation of selfadaptive, service-based, and distributed systems. Researchers exploit models, stochastic verification and control theory to develop innovative solutions. The SEAMS 2012 Symposium also emphasizes the importance of identifying significant exemplars for the community to use as benchmarks to validate and compare approaches. In an exemplar session, anchored by an interesting traffic control system paper, paper presenters have the opportunity to outline their favorite example system.