Distributed adaptation reasoning for a mobility and adaptation enabling middleware

Abstract

The prospect of adaptive, mobile applications provides both opportunity and challenge to the application developers. Adaptive, mobile applications are designed to constantly adapt to the contextual conditions with the aim of optimizing the quality of their offered service. In this respect the MADAM project provides software engineers with reusable models, tools and runtime support for enabling adaptive behavior in their mobile applications. This paper presents an extension to the MADAM middleware architecture which enables distributed compositions. To this end, a new adaptation reasoning approach is described, which improves on the original one in two ways: it allows decentralized reasoning for selecting the most suitable adaptation and it supports distributed application composition. Moreover, the proposed approach is argued to provide additional benefits such as robustness, agility and scalability. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.