Quality-driven systems

Most traditional systems produce a fixed quality of output under a fixed execution environment given identical input, even when the user does not need that quality of solution. We propose a new software architecture that can do quality-driven operations. The key concept of the architecture is that it contains multiple configurations so that it can adapt itself to fit various user requirements and constraints. The adaptation involves the tradeoff of a set of quality of service factors in order to provide the best feasible performance. A simple application is presented to demonstrate the power of the architecture. This quality-driving concept can be introduced to many domains; in fact, any resource-constrained or pay-per-use applications can be improved by the concept to provide a range of quality of services.