Awareness Requirements for Adaptive Systems

Recently, there has been a growing interest in self-adaptive systems. Roadmap papers in this area point to feedback loops as a promising way of operationalizing adaptivity in such systems. In this paper, we present a new type of requirement – called Awareness Requirement – that can refer to other requirements and their success/failures, constituting requirements for such feedback loops. We propose a way to elicit and formalize such requirements and validate our proposal using a monitoring framework. We further discuss how feedback loops could be implemented to provide adaptivity mechanisms to systems.