Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems: Assurances (Dagstuhl Seminar 13511)

The important concern for modern software systems is to become more cost-effective, while being versatile, flexible, resilient, dependable, energy-efficient, customisable, configurable and self-optimising when reacting to run-time changes that may occur within the system itself, its environment or requirements. One of the most promising approaches to achieving such properties is to equip software systems with self-managing capabilities using self-adaptation mechanisms. Despite recent advances in this area, one key aspect of self-adaptive systems that remains to be tackled in depth is assurances, i.e., the provision of evidence that the system satisfies its stated functional and non-functional requirements during its operation in the presence of self-adaptation. The provision of assurances for self-adaptive systems is challenging since run-time changes introduce a high degree of uncertainty during their operation. In this seminar, we discussed the problem of assurances for self-adaptive systems from four different views: criteria for assurances, composition and decomposition of assurances, feedback loop and assurances, and perpetual provisioning of assurances.