Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The software industry is faced with one main challenge: the high cost of software maintenance and operation. One of the main reasons for this is the usage and operation complexity of the software, together with its lack of run-time flexibility and adaptability to the workload and environment conditions. There seems to be two complementary solutions to this problem: adaptive and self-managing systems and software as a service computing model. The goal of this research program is to investigate methods, patterns, algorithms, architectures and methodologies that lead to adaptive software systems in the context of software as a service. Adaptive and self-managing software is software that can easier adapt to changes in user requirements, is more autonomic, more evolvable, that is software that can be easier upgraded, released and deployed. We are looking at the entire lifecycle of the software: analysis, modeling, development, deployment, operation as well as to specific run-time artifacts that enable adaptive systems. A specific goal of the research program is the advancement of model based feedback computing, in which the adaptation and self-management decisions are based on a model of the software. The models capture specific quality aspects such as performance or reliability or can capture partial functionality of the systems.