AVYTAT 2010 - First International Workshop on Adaptation in serVice EcosYsTems and ArchiTectures (AVYTAT 2010)

First International Workshop on Adaptation in serVice EcosYsTems and ArchiTectures (AVYTAT 2010)

Crete, Greece; October 25-29, 2010

WORKSHOP GOALS

The goal of this workshop is to explore adaptive systems, supported by open, dynamic architectures, particularly as expressed in the non-exclusive case of service ecosystems. In general, it intends to determine the synergies between architectural evolution and adaptation, and the influence of the underlying structure in their self-adaptive properties and attributes. Adaptivity is considered as an architecture-level feature, and therefore it cannot be dissociated from architectural specification.

DESCRIPTION

Traditionally, handling changing requirements, faults, or upgrades on different kinds of software-based systems have been tasks performed as a maintenance activity conducted by human operators at design/development time. However, factors such as uncertainty in the operational environment, resource variability, or the critical nature of some systems that cannot be halted in order to be changed, have lead to the development of systems able to re-plan and reconfigure their structure and behaviour at run time in order to improve their operation without any human intervention.

The increasing size and complexity of software systems has emphasized the importance of Software Architectures, conceived as complex composite structures. The same complexity leads to consider the need of self-management (Autonomic Computing) and to an increased interest in Software Adaptation, i.e. system-level reactions to changes in the environment. This has fostered new directions of research focused on the study of self-adaptive systems, that include autonomic structures and patterns, or self-organizing systems obtained by using control-oriented feedback mechanisms. Adaptivity is achieved as either a programmed or emerging property in the context of complex, open systems.

This workshop intends to explore this approach from an architectural perspective, considering a high-level scale. Indeed, the architectural approach for self-adaptation is one of the most promising lines of work in the field, where adaptive architectures present themselves as one of the most complex and interesting problems to solve from an architectural point of view. Adaptive architectures provide the only way to guarantee system-wide properties in a changing environment.

At the same time, component-based architectures are evolving towards service ecosystems, which can be described as open, evolutionary and adaptive architectures. Such service ecosystems present a number of special features which are of great interest from an architectural perspective. Hence, one of the purposes of the workshop is to achieve a better comprehension of software ecosystems as adaptive architectures.

Although most research efforts in these approaches have been isolated and lacked specific forums for discussion until recently, there is a thriving international community currently involved in the study of self-* systems, laying out the foundations that will enable their systematic development. Likewise, the goal of this workshop is gathering software engineering researchers from fields related to the development of adaptive architectures and service ecosystems in order to identify critical research challenges, as well as discussing models, techniques, tools, industrial cases, and methodologies for the development of those complex systems able to dynamically adapt their behaviour. Moreover, the aim of the workshop is addressing all these topics stressing the importance of integrating different achievements and devising generic approaches.

Further details can be found in the specific AVYTAT 2010 workshop site: http://quercusseg.unex.es/avytat

TOPICS

We are therefore interested in submissions in all topics related to these issues. These include, but would not be limited to:

? Adaptive, autonomic and self-* architectures.
? Service ecosystems as dynamic adaptive architectures (and vice versa).
? Self-adaptation issues in the context of service ecosystems.
? Language support and for self-* architecture and designs.
? Language support for adaptive service composition and/or coordination.
? Formal notations for modelling and analysis of adaptive architectures and ecosystems.
? Composition, evolution and adaptation models and frameworks.
? Computational reflection in the context of self-* systems.
? Dependability and autonomy in service ecosystems and architectures.
? Autonomic structures and adaptive roles in self-* architectures and ecosystems.
? Model-driven approaches for adaptive and self-* systems and ecosystems.
? Middleware for adaptive architectures and/or service ecosystems.
? Agent-based architectures as the basis for adaptive service ecosystems.
? Aspects and service discovery as catalysts of self-* properties.
? Non-invasive composition schemes as the basis for self-* properties.
? Case studies and experience reports.