Wave IV: Requirements‐driven Adaptation

In this chapter, the authors study three important approaches for requirements engineering of self‐adaptive systems. The first approach relies on relaxing requirements for self‐adaptive systems to mitigate uncertainties. The second approach models the requirements for adaptive behavior as meta‐requirements, i.e. requirements about the regular requirements of the system. Finally, the third approach looks at requirements of the functional behavior of feedback loops. Compared to traditional approaches for the specification of system requirements, languages and notations for specifying requirements of self‐adaptive systems need to explicitly address the uncertainties that are an inherent characteristic of these systems. The authors zoom in on an approach based on structured natural language that allows the requirements of adaptive behavior to be relaxed to mitigate uncertainty. They describe a modeling approach to specifying meta‐requirements for feedback loops.