User Guidance Of Resource-Adaptive Systems

• Main Authors: SOUSA, João Pedro, BALAN, Rajesh Krishna, Poladian, Vahe, Garlan, David, Satyanarayanan, Mahadev
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2008
• Subjects: Mobile Computing; Resource Adaptation; Self-adaptive Systems; Software Architecture.; Databases and Information Systems; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/808; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/1807/viewcontent/SousaetalICSOFT2008.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This paper presents a framework for engineering resource-adaptive software systems targeted at small mobile devices. The proposed framework empowers users to control tradeoffs among a rich set of ervicespecific aspects of quality of service. After motivating the problem, the paper proposes a model for capturing user preferences with respect to quality of service, and illustrates prototype user interfaces to elicit such models. The paper then describes the extensions and integration work made to accommodate the proposed framework on top of an existing software infrastructure for ubiquitous computing. The research question addressed here is the feasibility of coordinating resource allocation and adaptation policies in a way that end-users can understand and control in real time. The evaluation covered both systems and the usability perspectives, the latter by means of a user study. The contributions of this work are: first, a set of design guidelines for resource-adaptive systems, including APIs for integrating new applications; second, a concrete infrastructure that implements the guidelines. And third, a way to model quality of service tradeoffs based on utility theory, which our research indicates end-users with diverse backgrounds are able to leverage for guiding the adaptive behaviors towards activity-specific quality goals.