S/T/A: Meta-Modeling Run-Time Adaptation in Component-Based System Architectures

Modern virtualized system environments usually host diverse applications of different parties and aim at utilizing resources efficiently while ensuring that quality-of-service requirements are continuously satisfied. In such scenarios, complex adaptations to changes in the system environment are still largely performed manually by humans. Over the past decade, autonomic self-adaptation techniques aiming to minimize human intervention have become increasingly popular. However, given that adaptation processes are usually highly system specific, it is a challenge to abstract from system details enabling the reuse of adaptation strategies. In this paper, we propose a novel modeling language (meta-model) providing means to describe system adaptation processes at the system architecture level in a generic, human-understandable and reusable way. We apply our approach to three different realistic contexts (dynamic resource allocation, software architecture optimization, and run-time adaptation planning) showing how the gap between complex manual adaptations and their autonomous execution can be closed by using a holistic model-based approach.