Adaptation in Open Systems: Giving Interaction Its Rightful Place

We address the challenge of adaptation in open systems. Open systems are characterized by interactions among autonomous and heterogeneous participants. In such systems, each participant is a locus of adaptation; nonetheless, a participant would typically have to interact with others in order to effect an adaptation. Existing approaches for software adaptation do not readily apply to such settings as they rely upon control-based abstractions. We build upon recent work on modeling interaction via social commitments. Our contributions in this paper include (1) formalizing the notion of a participant’s strategy for a goal not just in terms of goals and plans, but also in terms of the commitments required, and (2) a conceptual model and framework for adaptation built around this notion of strategy that allows using arbitrary strategy selection criteria—for example, trust. We illustrate our contributions with examples from the emergency services domain.