Engineering Organised Adaptation: A Tutorial

Abstract

Many contemporary applications in distributed systems and networks demand that the components adapt the system functionality at run-time. We are particularly concerned with intentional change involving choice, coordination and collective action: this we call organised adaptation. There are many proposed formalisms for engineering such adaptation, primarily stemming from the fields of multi-agent systems and autonomic computing, and we propose an analytic framework against which we evaluate a number of prominent formalisms. We discuss the future challenges facing engineers of organised adaptation, in particular the requirement for a formal method for systems development and evaluation.