Abstract
[Context and motivation:] For realistic self-adaptive systems, multiple quality attributes need to be considered and traded off against each other. These quality attributes are commonly encoded in a utility function, for instance, a weighted sum of relevant objectives. [Question/problem:] The research agenda for requirements engineering for self-adaptive systems has raised the need for decision-making techniques that consider the trade-offs and priorities of multiple objectives. Human stakeholders need to be engaged in the decision-making process so that the relative importance of each objective can be correctly elicited. [Principal ideas/results:] This research preview paper presents a method that supports multiple stakeholders in prioritizing relevant quality attributes, negotiating priorities to reach an agreement, and giving input to define utility functions for self-adaptive systems. [Contribution:] The proposed method constitutes a lightweight solution for utility function definition. It can be applied by practitioners and researchers who aim to develop self-adaptive systems that meet stakeholders’ requirements. We present details of our plan to study the application of our method using a case study.
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Acknowledgments
This work is supported in part by the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP) funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, by award N00014172899 from the Office of Naval Research and by the NSA under Award No. H9823018D000. Any views, opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Naval Research or the NSA.
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Wohlrab, R., Garlan, D. (2021). Defining Utility Functions for Multi-stakeholder Self-adaptive Systems. In: Dalpiaz, F., Spoletini, P. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12685. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73128-1_8
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