Hope For The Best, Prepare For The Worst: Multi-Tier Control For Adaptive Systems

Most approaches for adaptive systems rely on models, particularly behaviour or architecture models, which describe the system and the environment in which it operates. One of the difficulties in creating such models is uncertainty about the accuracy and completeness of the models. Engineers therefore make assumptions which may prove to be invalid at runtime. In this paper we introduce a rigorous, tiered framework for combining behaviour models, each with different associated assumptions and risks. These models are used to generate operational strategies, through techniques such controller synthesis, which are then executed concurrently at runtime. We show that our framework can be used to adapt the functional behaviour of the system: through graceful degradation when the assumptions of a higher level model are broken, and through progressive enhancement when those assumptions are satisfied or restored.