Self-awareness in Software Engineering:A systematic literature review

Background: Self-awareness has been recently receiving attention in computing systems for enriching autonomous software systems operating in dynamic environments. Objective: We aim to investigate the adoption of computational self-awareness concepts in autonomic software systems and motivate future research directions on self-awareness and related problems. Method: We conducted a systemic literature review to compile the studies related to the adoption of self-awareness in software engineering and explore how self-awareness is engineered and incorporated in software systems. From 865 studies, 74 studies have been selected as primary studies. We have analysed the studies from multiple perspectives, such as motivation, inspiration, and engineering approaches, among others. Results: Results have shown that self-awareness has been used to enable self-adaptation in systems that exhibit uncertain and dynamic behaviour. Though there have been recent attempts to define and engineer self-awareness in software engineering, there is no consensus on the definition of self-awareness. Also, the distinction between self-aware and self-adaptive systems has not been systematically treated. Conclusions: Our survey reveals that self-awareness for software systems is still a formative field and that there is growing attention to incorporate self-awareness for better reasoning about the adaptation decision in autonomic systems. Many pending issues and open problems outline possible research directions

Engineering self-awareness with knowledge management in dynamic systems: a case for volunteer computing

The complexity of the modem dynamic computing systems has motivated software engineering researchers to explore new sources of inspiration for equipping such systems with autonomic behaviours. Self-awareness has recently gained considerable attention as a prominent property for enriching the self-adaptation capabilities in systems operating in dynamic, heterogeneous and open environments. This thesis investigates the role of knowledge and its dynamic management in realising various levels of self-awareness for enabling self­adaptivity with different capabilities and strengths. The thesis develops a novel multi-level dynamic knowledge management approach for managing and representing the evolving knowledge. The approach is able to acquire 'richer' knowledge about the system's internal state and its environment in addition to managing the trade-offs arising from the adaptation conflicting goals. The thesis draws on a case from the volunteer computing, as an environment characterised by openness, heterogeneity, dynamism, and unpredictability to develop and evaluate the approach. This thesis takes an experimental approach to evaluate the effectiveness of the of the dynamic knowledge management approach. The results show the added value of the approach to the self-adaptivity of the system compared to classic self­adaptation capabilities