Target Oriented Runtime Software Requirements Monitoring And Self-healing Technology Research

Software systems may deviate from their specification at runtime and cause problems to deliver key functionalities and satisfy stakeholder requirements due to the open, dynamic, complicated and volatile running environments along with internal pitfalls. For software services residing in Internet as Internetware featuring autonomic, collaborative, context-aware, evolving, and polymorphic natures, the problem is even more challenging.Self-repairing is a fundamental approach realizing the system’s self-managing ability to restore fulfillment of system requirements by relying on monitoring, reasoning, and diagnosing on the current state of individual requirements. Self-repairing is complicated by the multi-agent nature of Internetware and socio-technical systems, which demands that requirements monitoring and repairing be done in a decentralized fashion. Some researchers have already explored software requirements monitoring and repairing at runtime based on goal model and reasoning upon it. However, most of these works lack a mechanism to close the gap between the deviation detected and the repairing actions required and a comprehensive framework implementation, especially adaptable in distributed and social contexts, thus make it difficult to support multi-agent systems such as socio-technical systems.In this paper, we propose a stateful requirements monitoring approach. By defining goal state machines and related event mapping, state reasoning, and state consistency rules, the concept of runtime goal lifecycle is realized, which depicts different stages of requirements fulfillment and makes finer-grained and more precise repairing decision possible. Based on goal state machines, we implement a comprehensive requirements monitoring and repairing framework in Java that supports lightweight and customizable self-adaptive software development and modification in a non-intrusive manner. Our framework implementation is built upon multi-agent framework JADE so that once integrated with host systems not only internal behaviors but also goal delegation and agent collaboration are monitored. The isomorphic nature of goal state machines and event-driven interactions makes monitoring decentralized to individual system elements and repairing hierarchical among global components.To evaluate the effectiveness and performance of our requirements monitoring approach and the usability of our framework implementation, three experimental studies under different scenarios have been conducted. Results from our experiments suggest effective monitoring and precise repairing support for a wide range of applications.