Motivation

The constantly evolving technological infrastructure presents a daunting challenge of the development and assurance of software systems with increasing size and complexity. For the design of context-aware software systems that can automatically adapt to changes in their environments, new and innovative paradigms have to be developed that deal with the dynamic and complex nature of these systems. Such systems, called adaptive systems, play increasingly vital roles in society’s infrastructures. The demand for adaptive systems appears in application domains ranging from crisis management applications such as disaster management, first-response, transportation control, and power management to entertainment and business applications such as mobile interactive gaming, tourist guiding and business collaborations (e.g., through virtual organizations and dynamic service compositions). This demand is accentuated by the mobile and nomadic nature of many of these domains.

Indeed, future applications will need to cope with advanced properties such as context awareness and mobility, for which adequate scientific solutions must be devised together with accompanying software development notations, methods and tools (i.e. frameworks). Analysts forecast a global increase in the number of mobile workers to the level higher than 850 million by 2009. This leads us to introduce our view on next generation solution, considering both technological advances but also the need for closer integration with software engineering best practices, to ultimately suggest highly innovative solutions.

Goal

The ultimate goal of DiVA is to provide a new tool-supported methodology with an integrated framework for managing dynamic variability in adaptive systems. This goal will be addressed by combining aspect-oriented and model-driven techniques in an innovative way.

To accomplish this work we have assembled a consortium of complementary beneficiaries that includes: (i) market leaders within the software intensive industry, providing advanced end user systems and applications where the demand for adaptation is a major concern, (ii) research beneficiaries representing international expertise within the domains of Model Driven Engineering (MDE), Aspect-Oriented Modelling (AOM) and variability modelling and (iii) a leading tool vendor providing tools and technologies for management of product line system developments with a large number of variants.

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