Adaptation Timing in Self-Adaptive Systems

Software-intensive systems are increasingly expected to operate under changing and uncertain conditions, including not only varying user needs and workloads, but also fluctuating resource capacity. Self-adaptation is an approach that aims to address this problem, giving systems the ability to change their behavior and structure to adapt to changes in themselves and their operating environment without human intervention. Self-adaptive systems tend to be reactive and myopic, adapting in response to changes without anticipating what the subsequent adaptation needs will be. Adapting reactively can result in inefficiencies due to the system performing a suboptimal sequence of adaptations. Furthermore, some adaptation tactics—atomic adaptation actions that leave the system in a consistent state—have latency and take some time to produce their effect. In that case, reactive adaptation causes the system to lag behind environment changes. What is worse, a long running adaptation action may prevent the system from performing other adaptations until it completes, further limiting its ability to effectively deal with the environment changes. To address these limitations and improve the effectiveness of self-adaptation, we present proactive latency-aware adaptation, an approach that considers the timing of adaptation (i) leveraging predictions of the near future state of the environment to adapt proactively; (ii) considering the latency of adaptation tactics when deciding how to adapt; and (iii) executing tactics concurrently. We have developed three different solution approaches embodying these principles. One is based on probabilistic model checking, making it inherently able to deal with the stochastic behavior of the environment, and guaranteeing optimal adaptation choices over a finite decision horizon. The second approach uses stochastic dynamic programming to make adaptation decisions, and thanks to performing part of the computations required to make those decisions off-line, it achieves a speedup of an order of magnitude over the first solution approach without compromising optimality. A third solution approach makes adaptation decisions based on repertoires of adaptation strategies— predefined compositions of adaptation tactics. This approach is more scalable than the other two because the solution space is smaller, allowing an adaptive system to reap some of the benefits of proactive latency-aware adaptation even if the number of ways in which it could adapt is too large for the other approaches to consider all these possibilities. We evaluate the approach using two different classes of systems with different adaptation goals, and different repertoires of adaptation strategies. One of them is a web system, with the adaptation goal of utility maximization. The other is a cyberphysical system operating in a hostile environment. In that system, self-adaptation must not only maximize the reward gained, but also keep the probability of surviving a mission above a threshold. In both cases, our results show that proactive latency-aware adaptation improves the effectiveness of self-adaptation with respect to reactive time-agnostic adaptation.