Integrating Graceful Degradation and Recovery through Requirement-driven Adaptation

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are subject to environmental uncertainties such as adverse operating conditions, malicious attacks, and hardware degradation. These uncertainties may lead to failures that put the system in a sub-optimal or unsafe state. Systems that are resilient to such uncertainties rely on two types of operations: (1) graceful degradation, to ensure that the system maintains an acceptable level of safety during unexpected environmental conditions and (2) recovery, to facilitate the resumption of normal system functions. Typically, mechanisms for degradation and recovery are developed independently from each other, and later integrated into a system, requiring the designer to develop an additional, ad-hoc logic for activating and coordinating between the two operations. In this paper, we propose a self-adaptation approach for improving system resiliency through automated triggering and coordination of graceful degradation and recovery. The key idea behind our approach is to treat degradation and recovery as requirement-driven adaptation tasks: Degradation can be thought of as temporarily weakening original (i.e., ideal) system requirements to be achieved by the system, and recovery as strengthening the weakened requirements when the environment returns within an expected operating boundary. Furthermore, by treating weakening and strengthening as dual operations, we argue that a single requirement-based adaptation method is sufficient to enable coordination between degradation and recovery. Given system requirements specified in signal temporal logic (STL), we propose a run-time adaptation framework that performs degradation and recovery in response to environmental changes. We describe a prototype implementation of our framework and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach using a case study in unmanned underwater vehicles.Comment: Pre-print for the SEAMS '24 conference (Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems Conference