Tool for modeling and development of software systems based on self-healing mechanism

• Grant number: 14/19826-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: November 01, 2014
• End date: October 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computer Systems
• Principal Investigator: Frank José Affonso
• Grantee: Gustavo Leite
• Host Institution: Instituto de Geociências e Ciências Exatas (IGCE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Rio Claro. Rio Claro , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The development of self-adaptive software is a complex activity, since this type of software constantly deals with structural and behavioral changes at runtime. Recently, it has been noticed a lot of efforts addressed to design of software systems that react at runtime in the face of execution environment changes or new needs of users. In parallel, reference architectures capture the essence of architectures of similar systems, facilitating the design of concrete architectures for new systems, new system versions, or extensions of similar systems. Considering this context, current (Affonso, 2014) and previous (Affonso & Rodrigues, 2012) (Affonso & Nakagawa, 2013) projects of the supervisor of this proposal have acted on the design of reference architectures for self-adaptive systems or self-managed systems. During the current post-doctorate period, a scientific initiation project with financial support of the PIBIC/CNPq was conducted, which result was the development of a self-healing subsystem for such reference architectures. However, during the development of such project (PIBIC/CNPq), the need to automate a set of activities was noticed, since such subsystem must be configured or customized to operate in different environments and monitor different points of a system or architecture. Based on this scenario, this project aims to implement a visual tool that enables the software engineer and domain specialist to model and develop software systems based on self-healing mechanism. Moreover, another objective of this project is to create an approach to couple algorithms existing in other external tools. In this case, the association rules algorithm of the arules package existing in R software (R-Project, 2014) has been an object of interest, since this package offers better approaches for post-processing (i.e., a wide range of objective measures for rule ranking) than the one used in our subsystem. Therefore, it is intended, at the end of this project, to have a tool that enables the development of self-healing systems and that allows the software engineer and domain specialist to select the algorithms according to the needs of the problem (self-healing context).