11, Oct, 2009
Grenoble, France
Homepage: http://www.artist-embedded.org/artist/APRES-09.html
Project: ArtistDesign
Deadline: 9, Jul, 2009

Adaptive and reconfigurable systems can respond to environmental changes including hardware/software defects, resource changes, and non-continual feature usage, as well as provide support to live maintenance, extensibility and evolving requirements.
As such, these systems have the potential to exhibit an extended operations space and lifetime and improve efficiency in the use of system resources.
However, such flexibility also incurs overhead in terms of system complexity and resource requirements. For example, an adaptive system requires means for reconfiguration that allows it to adapt to changes. These means and their mechanisms introduce additional complexity to the design and the architecture, and they also require additional resources such as computation, power, and, for distributed reconfiguration, communication bandwidth.
Moreover, to take advantage of adaptability, new specification methods are needed, to define acceptable adaptation ranges which will be explored by the system at run-time to improve a given performance metric. However, current operating systems and network protocols are not designed to support such flexible requirements, and generally do not support complementary reflexive mechanisms that are needed to allow the application to adjust itself to the current configuration.
Finally, programming such systems also needs adequate middeware layers that provide adequate abstractions and interfaces for the development of adaptive applications. Building such middleware so that it preserves adaptability while providing performance guarantees together with satisfying other usual goals, such as modularity, reusability and scalability, is a challenge still to be conquered.

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