A Utility-Based Approach for Self-Adaptive Systems: Application to a Smart Building

摘要

Self-adaptation is an important capability for applications, especially those running in pervasive environments. Self-adaptive applications need a dynamic adaptation of their architecture to cope with the changes of their environments. A decision within the architectural adaptation must be taken to select the architectural configuration of the application that fits more the contextual situation. Many approaches for adaptation decisions are proposed in the literature. The utility-oriented approach is an efficient decision approach which arouses the interest of researchers. However, while different utility functions can be used, there is a lack of comparisons and recommendations for the choice of the utility functions. In this paper, we present an overview of the utility functions. Moreover, we present guidelines that support the choice of the most suitable utility function for the applications' designers.