Architectural Styles for Adaptive Systems: A Tutorial

Abstract

Modern and evolving domains such as ambient intelligence, context-aware applications, and pervasive computing require that software systems be able to cope with unprecedented degrees of runtime variability. This demands that software systems be flexible, and easily adaptable in the wake of change. Providing such flexibility is a multi-faceted challenge where the architectural design plays a key role. This tutorial presents the current state of practice in software architecture for adaptive systems, and provides an overview of the research directions in which the Software Architecture community is moving to better solve these issues.