Towards goal-oriented development of self-adaptive systems

Self-adaptive software aims at anticipating changes which occur in a complex environment and to automatically deal with them at run-time. The increasing demand for complex networked software, which makes computing resources available to anyone, anywhere and at any time, is drawing attention to the engineering of self-adaptive software. The objective of our work is to define a process and a tool-supported design framework to develop self-adaptive systems, which consider belief-Desire-Intention agent models as reference architectures. We adopt an agent-oriented approach, which allows to explicitly model system goals in requirements specification and in the system architecture design. Moreover, goal achievement conditions are specified along with their relationships with the environment and with possible failures, and corresponding recovery actions. This paper aims at motivating and giving an overview of our approach with the help of an example.