Overview

Funding

ADAPT is a research focus of the University of Koblenz-Landau. As part of its research strategy for the next years, the university has identified three research foci that receive special support and funding. This funding is also part of the state of Rhineland Palatinate's Research Initiative 2008-2011.

Objective

The objective of the research focus ADAPT is to relate, advance, combine, and challenge adaptation methods and associated methods of modeling and analyzing that are used by the communities of software engineering, programming languages, logic-based modeling, multi-agent systems, formal methods, SOA, web systems, and mobile, autonomous systems.

Participants and International Partners

ADAPT comprises expertise in the more fundamental areas of formal methods, programming languages, automated software engineering, and logic- and agent-based modeling, as much as in selected areas with complex needs for adaptability and adaptivity, namely service-oriented architectures, web systems, and autonomous mobile systems.

See Participants for a list of the nine research groups at the university's department of computer science that are involved in ADAPT.

ADAPT collaborates with two international partner institutions:

• Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informaticam (CWI), Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Chalmers University of Technology, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Gothenborg, Sweden

Background

Software Adaptation

Software systems are becoming more complex - particularly in terms of their dependence on other systems or services, and their interaction with the system's environment. Such complexity also increases the frequency of changing requirements and the degree of required ability to deal with a changing environment.

When a software system must meet changing requirements, then one has to leverage adaptability where available, or fall back to more invasive adaptation methods. When a software system must deal with a changing environment, then adaptivity has to be engineered into the system, so that the system can adapt its behavior or itself. These are different kinds of software adaptation.

Much effort in computer science is readily focused on software adaptation because adaptability supports reusability and evolvability of software and, hence, productivity in software development. Also, adaptivity fundamentally enables systems that require interaction with the environment including other systems or services.

Better Predictablity

It is difficult to predict the behavior of systems that are adaptable, or adaptive, or that are invasively adapted. ADAPT addresses this difficulty by modeling and analyzing software adaptation. Modeling raises the abstraction level and improves the developers' understanding of both the software subject to adaptation and the effect of adaptation. Analysis enables simulation and verification of the relevant systems and their adaptation. Better predictability implies improvement of system reliability and robustness. Also, costs for brute-force checking or testing can be reduced.