MOSAICO: offline synthesis of adaptation strategy repertoires with flexible trade-offs

Self-adaptation improves the resilience of software-intensive systems, enabling them to adapt their structure and behavior to run-time changes (e.g., in workload and resource availability). Many of these approaches reason about the best way of adapting by synthesizing adaptation plans online via planning or model checking tools. This method enables the exploration of a rich solution space, but optimal solutions and other guarantees (e.g., constraint satisfaction) are computationally costly, resulting in long planning times during which changes may invalidate plans. An alternative to online planning involves selecting at run time the adaptation best suited to the current system and environment conditions from among a predefined repertoire of adaptation strategies that capture repair and optimization tasks. This method does not incur run-time overhead but requires additional effort from engineers, who have to specify strategies and lack support to systematically assess their quality. In this article, we present MOSAICO, an approach for offline synthesis of adaptation strategy repertoires that makes a novel use of discrete abstractions of the state space to flexibly adapt extra-functional behavior in a scalable manner. The approach supports making trade-offs: (i) among multiple extra-functional concerns, and (ii) between computation time and adaptation quality (varying abstraction resolution). Our results show a remarkable improvement on system qualities in contrast to manually-specified repertoires. More interestingly, moderate increments in abstraction resolution can lead to pronounced quality improvements, whereas high resolutions yield only negligible improvement over medium resolutions.