Meta-Adaptation Strategies for Adaptation in Cyber-Physical Systems

Modern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) not only need to be dependable, but also resilient to and able to adapt to changing situations in their environment. When developing such CPS, however, it is often impossible to anticipate all potential situations upfront and provide corresponding tactics. Situations that lie out of this “envelope of adaptability” can lead to problems that range from single component malfunctioning to complete system failure. The existing approaches to self-adaptation cannot typically cope with such situations as they still rely on a fixed set of tactics, which in case of complex systems does not guarantee achieving correct functionality. To alleviate this problem, we propose the concept of meta-adaptation strategies, which extends the limits of adaptability of a system by constructing new tactics at runtime to reflect the changes in the environment. The approach is demonstrated on an existing architecture-based self-adaptation method and exemplified by two concrete meta-adaptation strategies.