Towards Unanticipated Adaptation: An Architecture-Based Approach

Over its lifetime, adaptive software may have to deal with the environment not anticipated during the original development. In such cases, we should introduce new adaptive code, for example, to detect the strange contexts or update the out-of-date adaptation decision logic. This paper proposes an engineering approach facilitates this kind of post-delivery modifications based on software architecture techniques. Our approach introduces a component model separates different adaptation concerns (sensing, decision and execution) as different types of software architecture elements. The clear separation lays the foundation for the independent maintenance of each concern. And then, with the aid of a container supports the instantiation and run-time modification of the software architecture model, those concerns can be bound together without recompiling the whole software, even while it is running. Our approach enables the fine-grained, low-cost modifications of delivered adaptive software in the case that an unanticipated environment emerges.