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NEWS: Deadline extended to June 22nd (abstracts) and July 6th (paper submission).

International Workshop on Adaptation in serVice EcosYsTems and ArchiTectures

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.