Integrating Perfective and Corrective Adaptation of Service-based Applications

Service-based Applications (SBAs) can be dynamically adapted to address various goals, which include (1) aiming to better achieve the users’ requirements (perfective adaptation), and (2) repairing and preventing failures (corrective adaptation). When building applications which aim at addressing more than of such goals, it is important to understand the interplay of these different adaptation goals. Otherwise this can lead to conflicting adaptations. This chapter introduces a framework to integrate and align perfective and corrective adaptations, while addressing the problems that are due to the interactions between these two kinds of adaptation. The framework uses requirements engineering techniques to trigger perfective adaptation and online testing techniques to trigger corrective adaptations. Based on the above techniques, this chapter investigates the interplay and interaction between the two types of adaptation. We demonstrate how perfective and corrective techniques can be integrated in a meaningful way to support the overall adaptation requirements of the service-based applications, while avoiding the above problems. As a solution, we propose exploiting an enterprise service registry, which restricts the ways in which a service-based application can be adapted.