The four types of self-adaptive systems: A metamodel

The basic ideas of self-adaptive systems are not a novelty in computer science. There are plenty of systems that are able of monitoring their operative context to take run-time decisions. However, more recently a new research discipline is trying to provide a common framework for collecting theory, methods, middlewares, algorithms and tools for engineering such software systems. The aim is to collect and classify existing approaches, coming from many different research areas. The objective of this work is providing a unified metamodel for describing the various categories of adaptation.