Engineering Trustworthy Self-Adaptive Software with Dynamic Assurance Cases

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Building on concepts drawn from control theory, self-adaptive software handles environmental and internal uncertainties by dynamically adjusting its architecture and parameters in response to events such as workload changes and component failures. Self-adaptive software is increasingly expected to meet strict functional and non-functional requirements in applications from areas as diverse as manufacturing, healthcare and finance. To address this need, we introduce a methodology for the systematic ENgineering of TRUstworthy Self-adaptive sofTware (ENTRUST). ENTRUST uses a combination of (1) design-time and runtime modelling and verification, and (2) industry-adopted assurance processes to develop trustworthy self-adaptive software and assurance cases arguing the suitability of the software for its intended application. To evaluate the effectiveness of our methodology, we present a tool-supported instance of ENTRUST and its use to develop proof-of-concept self-adaptive software for embedded and service-based systems from the oceanic monitoring and e-finance domains, respectively. The experimental results show that ENTRUST can be used to engineer self-adaptive software systems in different application domains and to generate dynamic assurance cases for these systems.
Original languageEnglish
Article number8008800
Pages (from-to)1039-1069
Number of pages31
JournalIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Volume44
Issue number11
Early online date11 Aug 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2018

Bibliographical note

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Keywords

  • Assurance cases
  • Assurance evidence
  • Self-adaptive software systems
  • Software engineering methodology

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