Implementing Proactive Means-End Reasoning

This work focuses on self-adaptation as a prominent property for developing complex distributed software systems. Taking in account that notable approaches as the runtime goal model artifacts, this paper investigates how it is possible to provide goal models at run-time that do not contain tasks, i.e. the description of how to address goals, thus breaking the design-time tie up between Tasks and Goals, generally outcome of a means-end analysis. In this vision the system is up to decide how to combine its available Capabilities: the Proactive Means-End Analysis. The envisioned impact is to implement a goal-oriented form of self-adaptation where goal models can be injected at runtime. The paper also introduces MUSA, a Middleware for User-driven Service self-Adaptation.