Managing Trade-offs in Adaptable Software Architectures

Foreword by David Garlan

David Garlan

The idea of a system that adapts itself while it is running is as old as the notion of computation. But for many years the complexity of creating such systems hardly justified their value. Systems typically ran in predictable, stable environments, and their requirements and fault models were fairly well prescribed.

But over the past couple of decades, many things have driven system designers to reconsider the proposition of self-adapting software systems. Today systems must function in complex environments built out of infrastructure, components, services, and other systems that are not under direct control of the original system’s developers. Requirements may change. Environments change, particularly ...