Integrated Modelling of Context-Aware Adaptive Software Systems
Mahmoud Hussein, Jun Han, Alan Colman · 2010
Software systems need to be developed with adaptation in mind, where they need to (a) detect the environment changes (i.e. context-aware) and (b) adapt at runtime to cope with these environment changes (i.e. adaptive) while preserving the system high level goals. As the software system needs to evolve at runtime, this poses a challenging question about how to model and realize this system. In this report, we present our novel approach for modelling and realizing context-aware adaptive software systems. Our approach contributions are as follows: (a) making the system modelling and realization easier by (a.1) proposing a new context-aware adaptive systems component model (CAMP) and (a.2) proposing meta-model of the software execution for enabling the generation of the system implementation; (b) reducing the system development errors by considering the system-context relationships at the modelling level; (c) providing a runtime representation of the system-context relationships to enable their adaptation and evolution at runtime; (d) the ability for testing and detecting missing/incorrect adaptation rules visually; (e) providing an adaptable context-awareness model to reduce the monitoring overhead; (f) reducing the system complexity by separating the context management from the functional system and its management. In addition, we demonstrate our approach through the modelling and the realization of the vehicle route planing system using our context-aware adaptive systems development tool (CAST).