Requirements and Architectures for Adaptive Systems

The growing interest in developing adaptive systems has led to numerous proposals for approaches aimed at supporting the development of such systems. Some approaches define adaptation mechanisms in terms of architectural designs, consisting of concepts such as components, connectors and states. Other approaches are requirements-based, thus concerned with goals, tasks, contexts and preferences as concepts in terms of which adaptation is defined. By considering only a partial view of software systems (either the problem space or the solution space), such proposals are limited in specifying the adaptive behavior of a software system. In this paper we present ongoing work towards deriving architectural models in order to support the design and runtime execution of software adaptation both at a requirements and architectural level.