A Multi-Goal Oriented Approach for Adaptation Rules Generation

Modern software runs in a dynamic, uncertain environment, and should satisfy multiple goals simultaneously. In order to allow software to respond to changes in the environment or user requirements and meet user goals continuously, an effective solution is to make the software self-adaptive. The adaptation capacity of software is provided by rules. As the complexity of self-adaptive software grows, designing and managing adaptation rules becomes increasingly challenging. To tackle this problem, some methods have been proposed to obtain adaptation rules automatically at runtime. However, these methods don't take the changes of user requirements into account sufficiently. When the user's preference of goals changes at runtime, adaptation rules usually need to be generated from scratch. It may produce huge computation cost. To overcome this limitation, we propose a multi-goal oriented approach for adaptation rules generation. This approach ensures that we can efficiently generate adaptation rules. We apply the approach to an unmanned underwater vehicles system. The experimental results show that our method is practical and highly-efficient in software reconfiguration under changing user's preference of goals.