| A general aim for high-tech system development is to improve system evolvability, i.e. the ability to easily adapt systems in response to evolution of technology, competition, and/or customer expectations. Systems should be easily modifiable to take advance of new hardware and software technologies and to respond quickly to changing customer expectations. Current development approaches specify the functionality of a system at design-time. Such approaches are not sufficiently adequate to develop systems that easily adapt to environmental or product usage fluctuations. A viable answer to these new challenges is genuine system adaptability; i.e. the ability of the system to adapt itself to fluctuations in the environment, the use of the product, etc.; naturally, these adaptations should not require an expensive and time-consuming product development cycle. Research challenge and approach: The challenges of creating adaptable systems are manifold: · Develop appropriate approaches to model and analyze the adaptable properties of the system in its environment. · What system quantities to use and how to measure them during operation? · What are the guidelines, approaches, and constructs to develop adaptable software and hardware? · The definition of an adaptability strategy, based on measurements, adaptability possibilities, product environment, etc. · The design of the control of both software and hardware to adapt the system s behavior according to the defined strategy. · The system adaptation can lead to emergent inappropriate and unpredictable behavior. How to guarantee correct run-time system behavior? The research thus has strong multi-disciplinary aspects, requiring expertise in different technical and scientific domains, including system measurements and model-based interpretation of measurement data, system and software architecture adaptability, adaptable resource usage and control strategies. To be successful, it is necessary to establish meaningful combinations of the analytic, modeling, and implementation techniques of the various disciplines. |
