Coupling software architecture and human architecture for collaboration-aware system adaptation

The emergence of socio-technical systems characterized by significant user collaboration poses a new challenge for system adaptation. People are no longer just the “users” of a system but an integral part. Traditional self-adaptation mechanisms, however, consider only the software system and remain unaware of the ramifications arising from collaboration interdependencies. By neglecting collective user behavior, an adaptation mechanism is unfit to appropriately adapt to evolution of user activities, consider side-effects on collaborations during the adaptation process, or anticipate negative consequence upon reconfiguration completion. Inspired by existing architecture-centric system adaptation approaches, we propose linking the runtime software architecture to the human collaboration topology. We introduce a mapping mechanism and corresponding framework that enables a system adaptation manager to reason upon the effect of software-level changes on human interactions and vice versa. We outline the integration of the human architecture in the adaptation process and demonstrate the benefit of our approach in a case study.