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Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems III. Assurances pp 251–281Cite as

Contracts-Based Control Integration into Software Systems

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9640))

Abstract

Among the different techniques that are used to design self-adaptive software systems, control theory allows one to design an adaptation policy whose properties, such as stability and accuracy, can be formally guaranteed under certain assumptions. However, in the case of software systems, the integration of these controllers to build complete feedback control loops remains manual. More importantly, it requires an extensive handcrafting of non-trivial implementation code. This may lead to inconsistencies and instabilities as no systematic and automated assurance can be obtained on the fact that the initial assumptions for the designed controller still hold in the resulting system.

In this chapter, we rely on the principles of design-by-contract to ensure the correction and robustness of a self-adaptive software system built using feedback control loops. Our solution raises the level of abstraction upon which the loops are specified by allowing one to define and automatically verify system-level properties organized in contracts. They cover behavioral, structural and temporal architectural constraints as well as explicit interaction. These contracts are complemented by a first-class support for systematic fault handling. As a result, assumptions about the system operation conditions become more explicit and verifiable in a systematic way.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://fikovnik.github.io/Actress.

  2. 2.

    Not shown in the excerpt, details are in Chap. 3 of Křikava’s PhD thesis [24].

  3. 3.

    Conceptually, each AE can be seen as a target system itself, and as such it can provide sensors and effectors enabling the AE reflection—hence the name adaptive element.

  4. 4.

    http://eclipse.org/Xtext.

  5. 5.

    http://akka.io.

  6. 6.

    Inspired by the Ptolemy 2 Accumulator actor cf. http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/ptolemyII/ptII8.1/ptII/doc/codeDoc/ptolemy/actor/lib/Accumulator.html.

  7. 7.

    First appeared in the Eiffel language under the name Design-by-contract [30].

  8. 8.

    By the term runtime exception, we mean all exceptions that are possibly thrown at runtime, which in the case of Xbase and Java include both checked and unchecked exceptions.

  9. 9.

    Making a parallel with the Meyer’s Disciplined Exception Handling principle [30], the resume and restart actions corresponds to the retrying response and the escalation falls into failure.

  10. 10.

    There are two reasons for the suffix: (i) it makes a clear distinction between contract logic and contract exception, and (i) it makes more sense English wise.

  11. 11.

    It is unlikely that such an exception would occur. However since the size of the response has to be converted from a into a declaring this runtime exception explicitly contributes to the AE robustness.

  12. 12.

    The implementation is rather naive, as the purpose is to demonstrate the language features.

  13. 13.

    http://bit.ly/1gHM975.

  14. 14.

    https://wiki.eclipse.org/Xbase.

  15. 15.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model.

  16. 16.

    http://www.mathworks.com/products/simulink/.

  17. 17.

    https://openmodelica.org/.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially supported by the Datalyse project www.datalyse.fr and was previously supported by the ANR SALTY project under contract ANR-09-SEGI-012.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Filip Křikava

  2. University of Lille/Inria, Lille, France

    Romain Rouvoy & Lionel Seinturier

  3. Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France

    Philippe Collet

Authors
  1. Filip Křikava
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  2. Philippe Collet
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  4. Lionel Seinturier
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Filip Křikava .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom

    Rogério de Lemos

  2. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

    David Garlan

  3. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Carlo Ghezzi

  4. Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering, Potsdam, Germany

    Holger Giese

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Křikava, F., Collet, P., Rouvoy, R., Seinturier, L. (2017). Contracts-Based Control Integration into Software Systems. In: de Lemos, R., Garlan, D., Ghezzi, C., Giese, H. (eds) Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems III. Assurances. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9640. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74183-3_9

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