A Context-Role Based Modeling Framework for Engineering Adaptive Software Systems

Abstract

To engineer adaptive software systems, it is crucial to capture changes that drive adaptation. We believe that a pair of concepts, context and roles, is most effective in capturing such changes and creating an adaptation mechanism to deal with those changes. We propose a new framework for developing adaptive software systems based on Epsilon, a context-role oriented approach. The framework covers the whole process of adaptive system development, starting from the requirements phase through the implementation phase of program generation by means of model building and model transformation. We show effectiveness of our approach with a case study of the Traffic Jam Monitoring System. In this case, traffic jam occurrence, growth and dissolution are captured as context creation, merging and splitting and roles are played by intelligent cameras. How an Epsilon model is built and then successively transformed into a final program through several steps of model transformation is explained.