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Scen@rist: an approach for verifying self-adaptive systems using runtime scenarios

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Abstract

Traditional runtime quantitative verification approaches for self-adaptive systems usually rely on the use of state-transition models to describe the system behaviour and check property violation at runtime. More recently, some approaches have advocated the use of scenarios as a strategy for representing both the normal and adaptive system behaviour. However, the use of scenarios as a runtime entity that drives the system adaptation is still a challenge since many research issues regarding the use of scenarios to support analysis for enabling self-adjustment at runtime in software systems remain open. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we investigate the use of scenario-based approaches in self-adaptive systems via a systematic mapping study. Secondly, we introduce Scen@rist, an approach that uses scenarios as runtime entities for verifying self-adaptive systems. The approach consists of monitoring a running self-adaptive system, annotating its scenario-based behaviour specification with the probability of transitions between scenarios, and then verifying whether a set of reachability properties hold. This is performed by translating the scenario-based models and properties in their probabilistic state-based counterparts and applying a model checking technique. The applicability of the proposed tool has been demonstrated by two self-adaptive service-based systems taken from the literature.

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Notes

  1. According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word scenarist means “the writer of scenarios, storylines for motion pictures.”

  2. Also known as scoping review or scoping study

  3. http://scenariotools.org/

  4. https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/

  5. https://www.eclipse.org/aspectj/

  6. https://github.com/lotus-tool/

  7. http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2017/7145/

  8. https://github.com/lucasvieira123/ScenarioTrace

  9. https://github.com/lotus-tool/lotus-tool

  10. www.lero.ie

  11. Backward snowballing checks papers that are cited in the included papers, while forward snowballing checks papers that cite the included papers.

  12. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/

  13. http://dl.acm.org/

  14. http://www.sciencedirect.com/

  15. http://www.scopus.com/

  16. https://www.zotero.org/

  17. Ratio between included studies of a database and the total of included studies in the systematic mapping study.

  18. Ratio between the total of included studies of a database and the total of obtained studies by this database.

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Funding

This work was financed in part by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel - Brazil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001. This work was also partially supported by CNPq/Brazil under grant Universal 438783/2018-2 and by Science Foundation Ireland grant 13/RC/2094 and co-funded under the European Regional Development Fund through the Southern & Eastern Regional Operational Programme to Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre.Footnote 10

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  1. State University of Ceará (UECE), Fortaleza, Brazil

    Rômulo Gadelha, Lucas Vieira, Felipe Vidal & Paulo Henrique Maia

  2. Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Davi Monteiro

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  1. Rômulo Gadelha
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Appendix A: Mapping protocol

Appendix A: Mapping protocol

1.1 A.1 Planning the mapping

The mapping protocol was developed by the first author, validated by the other authors, and then iteratively improved during the conducting and reporting phases. Its key elements include the following: (i) the research questions; (ii) the search strategy; and (iii) the selection criteria (i.e. the inclusion and exclusion criteria). It is important to mention that a quality assessment stage was not applied as a criterion for study selection since it is not required in systematic mapping studies (Kitchenham et al. 2015). In the remainder of this appendix, we describe each of those steps.

(i) Research questions: :

Table 1 presents the high-level research questions that were formulated to guide the research methodology.

(ii) Search strategy: :

Our search strategy is twofold: an automatic search and a backward-forwardFootnote 11 snowballing. The criteria used to select the electronic data sources were as follows: (i) the versatility of results exportation (search results may be exported to a reference manager or text file); (ii) the quality of the results (reliable accuracy of the results returned by the search); and (iii) the ability to handle advanced searches. Thus, the automatic search was performed on three publisher’s sites (IEEE Xplore,Footnote 12 ACM Digital Library,Footnote 13 ScienceDirectFootnote 14) and one index engine (Scopus.Footnote 15) All searches were based on title, keywords, and abstract fields, except for ACM Digital Library, in which the search was based on the entire paper.

Based on the goals of this systematic mapping study, a set of terms, which have been categorised into three groups, as presented in Table 4, was defined to form the search string. The first group (G1) regards the domain of the self-adaptive systems and the second one (G2) is related to scenario-based approaches. The third group (G3) contains keywords concerning the scenario-based approaches in the context of self-adaptive systems. The overall search string can be combined in the following form: (G1 AND G2) OR G3.

Table 4 Search string
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Aiming to refine our search string, we conducted pilot searches and eliminated terms whose inclusion did not return additional papers. At last, due to the lack of standardisation of search syntax in electronic data sources, we adapted our search string according to the requirements of each data source. However, we strove to ensure that those search strings were logically and semantically equivalent. Both database searches and snowballing technique were conducted between January and February 2018 and were not limited by year of publication.

(iii) Inclusion and exclusion criteria: :

The automatic search resulted in an extensive list of potential papers that could be included in this systematic mapping study. Therefore, we adopted one inclusion (IC) and five exclusion criteria (EC) to include papers that are relevant to answer the research questions and exclude papers that do not contribute to answering them. The inclusion criterion is as follows: (IC1) papers that propose or apply a scenario-based approach or technique in the context of self-adaptive systems. The exclusion criteria are as follows: (EC1) papers written in a language other than English, or that do not have their full text available; (EC2) editorials, keynotes, tutorials, posters, or panels; (EC3) papers that mention scenarios only as a general introductory term; (EC4) papers with less than four pages since they could not contain sufficient details about the nature of the work; and (EC5) secondary or tertiary studies.

For completeness and repeatability, Kitchenham et al. (2012) recommend that systematic mapping studies cite all papers related to a specific study, not just the most detailed or most recent ones. However, for aggregation purposes, it is essential that such “similar” papers be identified, so that the results are not counted more than once (Kitchenham et al. 2015). Therefore, for example, if a conference paper was extended to a journal version, we extracted data about the study from both versions but reported them as one study, i.e. merged the duplicates.

1.2 A.2 Conducting the mapping

The conducting phase is characterised by the execution of the mapping protocol defined in the planning phase. We applied a two-stage selection process: preliminary selection and final selection. The former encompassed reading the titles, abstracts, and keywords of the papers retrieved from the electronic data sources, while the latter encompassed the full reading of the papers classified for inclusion in the previous stage. Two researchers (first and third authors) individually performed the selection activities to minimise the effect of any bias or misinterpretation. Therefore, in each stage, each paper was evaluated twice by different researchers.

Papers indexed by more than one electronic data source were identified and removed by the open source bibliography management tool Zotero,Footnote 16 and then the researchers conducted the preliminary selection to filter papers based on the inclusion/exclusion criteria against the information available in titles, abstracts, and keywords. Next, an agreement meeting was held to compare the results and resolve existing conflicts, thus resulting in a consensual preliminary selection. In unclear cases, to avoid premature exclusion of studies, we opted for temporarily including them in the next stage. Afterwards, the filtered papers were fully read, and the selection criteria were applied to compose the final set of relevant papers. Again, a new agreement meeting took place to compare results and resolve disagreements.

We used our search string on the selected electronic data sources and found 348 (after removing 126 duplicates) papers in total (Table 5). In the preliminary selection, 107 potentially relevant papers were filtered based on title, abstract, and keywords, and 15 of them were selected after being thoroughly read. By using the backward-forward snowballing technique, the reference lists of the selected papers were then checked, and the inclusion/exclusion criteria were applied again to confirm the final selection. As a result, 14 additional papers were included, thus resulting in a final set of 29 papers that were considered relevant to this systematic mapping study. However, eight of these 29 papers report overlapping results. In these cases, as mentioned in Section AA.1, we merged the duplicates. Thus, in the rest of the mapping, we mention 21 studies (see Table 6) in total, even though we did analyse 29 papers. A further investigation into the reasons behind the high number of papers discovered through the snowballing method in comparison with the total number of papers indicated that some of them do not use terms related to scenarios (G2) in their titles, abstracts, or keywords.

Table 5 Electronic data sources, obtained and included papers
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Table 6 List of selected studies
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Table 5 summarises the number of obtained papers (OP), included papers (IP), the index rateFootnote 17 (IR), and the precision rateFootnote 18 (PR) for each electronic data source. Figure 24 details the stages of the search process.

Fig. 24
figure 24

Overview of the search process

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Gadelha, R., Vieira, L., Monteiro, D. et al. Scen@rist: an approach for verifying self-adaptive systems using runtime scenarios. Software Qual J 28, 1303–1345 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-019-09486-x

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