A literature review on optimization techniques for adaptation planning in adaptive systems: State of the art and research directions
Information and Software Technology, (2022)Abstract
Context:
Recent developments in modern IT systems including internet of things, edge/fog computing, or cyber–physical systems support intelligent and seamless interaction between users and systems. This requires a reaction to changes in their environment or the system. Adaptive systems provide mechanisms for these reactions.
Objective:
To implement this functionality, several approaches for the planning of adaptations exist that rely on rules, utility functions, or advanced techniques, such as machine learning. As the adaptation space with possible options is often extensively huge, optimization techniques might support efficient determination of the adaptation space and identify the system’s optimal configuration. With this paper, we provide a systematic review of adaptation planning as the optimization target.
Method:
In this paper, we review which optimization techniques are applied for adaptation planning in adaptive systems using a systematic literature review approach.
Results:
We reviewed 115 paper in detail out of an initial search set of 9,588 papers. Our analysis reveals that learning techniques and genetic algorithms are by far dominant; in total, heuristics (anytime learning) are more frequently applied as exact algorithms. We observed that around 57% of the approaches target multi-objectiveness and around 30% integrate distributed optimization. As last dimension, we focused on situation-awareness, which is only supported by two approaches.
Conclusion:
In this paper, we provide an overview of the current state of the art of approaches that rely on optimization techniques for planning adaptations in adaptive systems and further derive open research challenges, in particular regarding the integration of distributed optimization and situation-awareness.
