Efficient adaptation decision making algorithms for context-aware applications

The trend within computer science towards ubiquitous and autonomic computing results in the necessity to realize adaptive applications. The environment of applications becomes more heterogeneous and user needs vary heavily. In order to maintain the usability, availability and reliability of these applications, adaptive behavior is needed. The focus of our research is the decision making phase in realizing adaptive behavior of an application. Algorithms reason about the adaptive application with the goal to select a new application variant that better fits the new environment. This reasoning has to be done on a search space which tends to be very complex, and consequently poses a problem towards scalability, even when applications are relatively small. Therefore, we present two novel algorithms which handle the complex search space in an intelligent way. In this paper, both algorithms are introduced along with a thorough evaluation of their behavior and scalability.status: publishe