REQUIREMENTS@RUNTIME · Requirements-aware systems

Increasingly software systems are required to survive fluctuations in their execution environment without or with only little human intervention. These systems, sometimes known as eternal systems, need to fluidly reconfigure and adapt to the ongoing circumstances and find the way to continue accomplishing their functionalities and requirements. Different international research initiatives have already started producing good results in the development of technologies to support such systems. However, building these eternal systems is risky. Designers must ensure that any critical requirements of the system continue to be satisfied before, during and after a dynamic change. In current software engineering (SE) paradigms, systems are not aware of their requirements. This proposal uses the novel notion of requirements reflection, that is, the ability of a system to dynamically observe and reason about its requirements. The project aims to address the need of having systems requirements-aware by reifying requirements as run-time objects. Dr. Nelly Bencomo, who is currently a senior researcher at Lancaster University (UK) and has experience in the development of reflective adaptive applications and requirement specification, will implement the 18-months-project. Dr. Valérie Issarny from INRIA (France) who is an expert in pervasive and adaptive middleware applications is the scientist in charge.