Towards a knowledge-based approach to architectural adaptation management

Self-adaptive software continually evaluates and modifies its own behavior to meet changing demands. One of the key issues in constructing such software is that of planning when and what kinds of adaptations are appropriate. In this paper, we present an architecture-centric knowledge-based approach for specifying and enacting architectural adaptation policies as the main driver for self-adaptive behavior. Our work applies explicitly represented knowledge-based policies for the definition and enactment of software adaptation at the architectural level. A key benefit of our approach is the decoupling of adaptation policy from system implementation as well as the independent and dynamic evolution of policies themselves. We elaborate our overall approach, present prototype tools and techniques for its support, and discuss future research directions.