Research Article Using Statistical Assertions to Guide Self-Adaptive Systems

Copyright © 2014 Tim Todman et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Self-adaptive systems need to monitor themselves, to check their internal behaviour and design assumptions about runtime inputs and conditions. This kind of monitoring for self-adaptive systems can include collecting statistics about such systems themselves which can be computationally intensive (for detailed statistics) and hence time consuming, with possible negative impact on self-adaptive response time. To mitigate this limitation, we extend the technique of in-circuit runtime assertions to cover statistical assertions in hardware.The presented designs implement several statistical operators that can be exploited by self-adaptive systems; a novel optimization is developed for reducing the number of pairwise operators fro