Automated multi-objective control for self-adaptive software design

While software is becoming more complex everyday, the requirements on its behavior are not getting any easier to satisfy. An application should offer a certain quality of service, adapt to the current environmental conditions and withstand runtime variations that were simply unpredictable during the design phase. To tackle this complexity, control theory has been proposed as a technique for managing software's dynamic behavior, obviating the need for human intervention. Control-theoretical solutions, however, are either tailored for the specific application or do not handle the complexity of multiple interacting components and multiple goals. In this paper, we develop an automated control synthesis methodology that takes, as input, the configurable software components (or knobs) and the goals to be achieved. Our approach automatically constructs a control system that manages the specified knobs and guarantees the goals are met. These claims are backed up by experimental studies on three different software applications, where we show how the proposed automated approach handles the complexity of multiple knobs and objectives.