Towards Meta-Adaptation Support with Reusable and Composable Adaptation Components

Abstract

Software systems today are increasingly used in changing environments and expected to adapt with variable adaptation concerns. This requirement demands a systematic approach to efficiently construct system global adaptation behaviour according to the dynamic adaptation requirements. This paper presents Transformer a framework for adaptation behaviour composition support based on reusable and compos able adaptation components. Rather than using one adaptation module for all possible contexts, Transformer constructs system global adaptation behaviour by contextually fusing adaptation plans from multiple adaptation components. Explicit conflict resolution is provided to handle possible conflicts raised in the fusion process. In addition to the description of the Transformer framework, this paper also presents its implementation and its application to a video conferencing system. Qualitative analysis and simulation results show that our framework exhibits significant advantage over traditional approaches in light of flexibility and reusability of the adaptation components with little performance overhead.