Using Statistical Assertions to Guide Self-Adaptive Systems. (13th April 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Todman, Tim; Stilkerich, Stephan; Luk, Wayne
• Other Names: Santambrogio Marco D. Academic Editor.
• Is Part Of: International journal of reconfigurable computing. Volume 2014(2014)
• Publication Date: 2014-04-13
• Subjects: Adaptive computing systems -- Periodicals; Adaptive computing systems; Periodicals; 004
• DOI: 10.1155/2014/724585
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1687-7195

Abstract

Abstract : Self-adaptive systems need to monitor themselves, to check their internal behaviour and design assumptions about runtime inputs and conditions. This kind of monitoring for self-adaptive systems can include collecting statistics about such systems themselves which can be computationally intensive (for detailed statistics) and hence time consuming, with possible negative impact on self-adaptive response time. To mitigate this limitation, we extend the technique of in-circuit runtime assertions to cover statistical assertions in hardware. The presented designs implement several statistical operators that can be exploited by self-adaptive systems; a novel optimization is developed for reducing the number of pairwise operators fromO N toO log ⁡ N . To illustrate the practicability and industrial relevance of our proposed approach, we evaluate our designs, chosen from a class of possible application scenarios, for their resource usage and the tradeoffs between hardware and software implementations.