The SOTA approach to engineering collective adaptive systems

The emergence of collective adaptive systems—i.e., computational systems made up of an ensemble of autonomous components that have to operate in a coordinated and adaptive way in open-ended and unpredictable environments—calls for innovative modeling and software engineering tools, to support their systematic and rigorous design and development. In this paper, we present a general model for collective adaptive systems called SOTA (“State Of The Affairs”). SOTA brings together the lessons of goal-oriented requirements modeling, context-aware system modeling, and dynamical systems modeling. It has the potential for acting as a general reference model to help tackling some key issues in the design and development of collective adaptive systems. In particular, as we will show with reference to a scenario of collectives of autonomous vehicles, SOTA enables: early verification of requirements, identification of knowledge requirements for self-adaptation, and the identification of the most suitable architectural patterns for self-adaptation.