Can Control-Component Libraries Reduce the Costs of Developing Control Engineering-Based Self-Adaptive Systems?

Many approaches have been proposed to develop self-adaptive software systems based on control engineering methods in recent years. However, these research works only evaluate the self-adaptive capabilities of the proposed control solution, but no evaluation is performed to quantify the costs of implementing such a control solution. This paper provides results of an empirical study, conducted to quantify the implementation, testing and knowledge requirement costs of building a self-adaptive software system using control engineering methods. Our objective is to investigate, whether these costs can be significantly reduced if a library of prepackaged control components is available to software engineers. The findings of the study indicate that the aforementioned costs can be significantly reduced when supporting libraries are available. We also list the lessons learned from this study and recommendations, which may be useful in designing experiments to evaluate engineering costs of self-adaptive methods in the future.