Software systems dealing with distributed applications in changing environments normally require human supervision to continue operation in all conditions. These (re-)configuring, troubleshooting, and in general maintenance tasks lead to costly and time-consuming procedures during the operating phase. These problems are primarily due to the open-loop structure often followed in software development. Therefore, there is a high demand for management complexity reduction, management automation, robustness, and achieving all of the desired quality requirements within a reasonable cost and time range during operation. Self-adaptive software is a response to these demands; it is a closed-loop system with a feedback loop aiming to adjust itself to changes during its operation. These changes may stem from the software system’s self (internal causes e.g., failure) or context (external events e.g., increasing requests from users). Such a system is required to monitor itself and its context, detect significant changes, decide how to react, and act to execute such decisions. These processes depend on adaptation properties (called self-* properties), domain characteristics (context information or models), and preferences of stakeholders. Noting these requirements, it is widely believed that new models and frameworks are needed to design self-adaptive software. This survey article presents a taxonomy, based on concerns of adaptation, i.e., how, what, when and where, towards providing a unified view of this emerging area. Moreover, as adaptive systems are encountered in many disciplines, it is imperative to learn from the theories and models developed in these other areas. This survey article presents a landscape of research in self-adaptive software by highlighting relevant disciplines and some prominent research projects. This landscape helps to identify the underlying research gaps and elaborates on the corresponding challenges.

Abstract. Complex software systems, like operating systems and middleware, have to cope with a broad range of requirements as well as strict resource constraints. Family-based software development is a promising approach to develop application-specific systems from reusable components. However, once statically configured, these systems still need to adapt at runtime according to the dynamics of the environment. The majority of the concerns in the complex systems, that need to be adaptable, are crosscutting. With the application of Aspect-oriented Programming (AOP), these concerns can be cleanly encapsulated, and then dynamic AOP can be applied for the adaptations to be contained, and applied at runtime. An efficient dynamic aspect weaver is needed for the dynamic weaving and unweaving of these crosscutting concerns into the system. None of the currently available dynamic weaver can be optimized according to specific application requirements. In this paper we present the family-based dynamic weaver framework that supports the static as well as dynamic weaving and unweaving of the aspects to the components. By applying the program family concept, the system itself as well as the dynamic weaver, built on top of it, is tailored down to provide only the features or services required by any particular application. 1

Data management is one of the fundamental requirements of ubiquitous computing. Existing data management systems are complex and provide a multitude of functionalities. Due to complexity and their monolithic architecture, it is difficult to tune these data management systems for consistent performance. In this paper, we extend our existing work of Cellular DBMS with the concept of autonomy. We present an aspect-oriented programming based model that enables us to monitor and evolve cells during data management operations for consistent performance. 1.

In January 2008, the Programming model Institute of CoreGRID held a plenary meeting in Paris. The meeting was aimed at discussing progress achieved on the Programming model Institute research themes. During the meeting – most of the Institute partners were attending – different researchers presented their on-going work related to the Institute research themes. The meeting was also notable in that it was the first technical meeting where the new Associate partners of CoreGRID (those involved in the Programming model Institute activities) participated actively. This report hosts a synthetic version of the work presented in the Paris meeting. The different contributions cover