Guest Editorial: Adaptive and reconfigurable service-oriented, cloud and virtualized architectures

International audienceThe concept of adaptive and reconfigurable Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been introduced in order to describe architectures that exhibit emerging functional and non-functional properties in changing contexts. An adaptive and reconfigurable SOA can repair itself if any execution problem occurs, in order to successfully complete its own execution, while respecting functional and non-functional agreements. In the design of an adaptive and reconfigurable SOA, several aspects have to be considered. For instance, the architecture components should be able to predict and to detect degradations and failures as soon as possible and to enact suitable recovery actions such as scaling-up and scaling-out of virtual execution resources. Moreover, different non-functional service-level requirements might be considered in order to complete the execution in case of a predicted imminent or observed occurring failure. Contributions are devoted to the design and the implementation of adaptive and reconfigurable SOA and related Cloud applications. The issue contains five papers related to the foundations of "SOA and Cloud Computing" and the tools and applications for "Smart and Cyber-Physical environments". Service Oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing "E2SM: A Security tool for Adaptive Cloud-based Service-Oriented Applications" by Takoua Abdellatif proposes an End-to-end Security Model (E2SM) that aims to protect data confidentiality in adaptive cloud-based SOA applications. Whereas Leah Mutanu and Gerald Kotonya study the key factors that influence runtime adaptation in service-oriented architectures, and examines how well they are addressed in 29 adaptation approaches intended to support service-oriented systems in the paper entitled "What, Where, When, How and Right of Runtime Adaptation in Service-Oriented Systems". The paper entitled "Modeling and Analyzing Elastic Strategies in Cloud Systems" by Khaled Khebbeb et al. proposes a Bigraphical Reactive Systems based approach to provide a formal modelling of Cloud systems' structure using bigraphs, and their elastic behaviours using bigraphical reaction rules. Smart and Cyber-Physical environments "Modeling and Verifying Time-aware Processes for Cyber-Physical Environments" by Imen Graja et al. proposes to extend Business Process Modeling Notation to support the various Cyber-physical system concepts and properties. The paper entitled "Smart and Safe Self-Adaption of Connected Devices Based on Discrete Controllers" by Arthur Gatouillat et al. proposes a self-adaptation framework to deal with changes and takes into account storage, computational and communication constraints