A Goal-Based Modeling Approach to Develop Requirements of an Adaptive System with Environmental Uncertainty

Cheng, B. H. C. and Sawyer, Peter and Bencomo, Nelly and Whittle, Jon (2009) A Goal-Based Modeling Approach to Develop Requirements of an Adaptive System with Environmental Uncertainty. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS '09) :. Lecture Notes in Computer Science . Springer, Denver, Co, USA, pp. 468-483. ISBN 978-3-642-04424-3

Abstract

Dynamically adaptive systems (DASs) are intended to monitor the execution environment and then dynamically adapt their behavior in response to changing environmental conditions. The uncertainty of the execution environment is a major motivation for dynamic adaptation; it is impossible to know at development time all of the possible combinations of environmental conditions that will be encountered. To date, the work performed in requirements engineering for a DAS includes requirements monitoring and reasoning about the correctness of adaptations, where the DAS requirements are assumed to exist. This paper introduces a goal-based modeling approach to develop the requirements for a DAS, while explicitly factoring uncertainty into the process and resulting requirements. We introduce a variation of threat modeling to identify sources of uncertainty and demonstrate how the RELAX speci- cation language can be used to specify more exible requirements within a goal model to handle the uncertainty.