APRES 2014 - 6th Workshop on AdaPtive and Reconfigurable Embedded Systems (APRES 2014)

Adaptive systems can respond to environmental changes including usage conditions, hardware/software defects, resource allocation, and non-continual feature usage. As such, adaptive systems can extend the area of operations and improve efficiency in the use of system resources. However, adaptability also incurs overhead in terms of system complexity and requirements, as a result the adaptive system needs careful design and usage testing. More precisely, an adaptive system requires means for reconfiguration that allows it to adapt to changes. These means and their mechanisms introduce additional complexity to the design and the architecture, and they also require additional resources such as computation, power, and also communication bandwidth for distributed reconfiguration.
Moreover, to take advantage of adaptability, new specification methods are needed, to define acceptable adaptation ranges which will be explored by the system at run-time to improve a given performance metric. However, current operating systems and network protocols are not designed to support such flexible requirements, and generally do not support complementary reflexive mechanisms that are needed to allow the application to adjust itself to the current configuration. Finally, programming such systems also needs adequate middleware layers that provide adequate interfaces for the development of adaptive applications. Building such middleware so that it preserves adaptability while providing performance guarantees together with satisfying other usual goals, such as modularity, reusability and scalability, is a challenge still to be conquered.
This workshop brings together researchers in the development and use of adaptive and reconfigurable embedded systems and from the embedded systems community at large. Of particular interest are new concepts and ideas for modeling and analyzing tradeoffs of embedded and real-time systems, novel algorithms and mechanisms to realize adaptation and reconfigurability, and experience reports with practical case studies.