Towards Correctness Assurance in Adaptive Service-Based Applications

Service-based applications (SBAs) increasingly have to become adaptive in order to operate and evolve in highly dynamic environments. Research on SBAs thus has already produced a range of adaptation techniques and strategies. However, adaptive SBAs are prone to specific failures that would not occur in “static” applications. Examples are faulty adaptation behaviours due to changes not anticipated during design-time, or conflicting adaptations due to concurrently occurring events. For adaptive SBAs to become reliable and thus applicable in practice, novel techniques that ensure the correctness of adaptations are needed. To pave the way towards those novel techniques, this paper identifies different kinds of adaptation-specific failures. Based on a classification of existing adaptation approaches and generic correctness assurance techniques, we discuss how adaptation-specific failures can be addressed and where new advanced techniques for correctness assurance of adaptations are required.