Evolving Adaptable Systems: Potential and Challenges.
Klaus Schmid, Holger Eichelberger, Ursula Goltz, Malte Lochau · 2010
Future software systems will be even longer in ser-vice than today (which often is already measured in decades). During operation, a system must change in many ways, e.g., due to environment changes, functional enhancements, etc. While adaptive soft-ware systems already cope with changing environ-ments, existing approaches are insufficient to ad-dress an open-ended world where unpredictable changes may happen that cannot be foreseen. Here, we discuss how existing work in (dynamic) soft-ware product lines, evolution of product lines (e.g. [1]) and adaptive systems (e.g. [2]) can be com-bined to improve evolvability of adaptive systems. Before we discuss the evolution of adaptive sys-tems, we first outline the concept of variability and