14th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing SystemsSEAMS 2019

SEAMS 2019 will be colocated with ICSE 2019 and held in Montreal, May 25-26, 2019.

The objective of SEAMS is to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas to investigate, discuss, and examine the fundamental principles, the state of the art, and critical challenges of engineering self-adaptive and self-managing systems.

Modern and emerging software systems, such as industrial Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, cloud and edge computing, robotics, and smart environments have to operate without interruption. Self-adaptation and self-management enable these systems to adapt themselves at runtime to preserve and optimize their operation in the presence of uncertain changes in their operating environment, resource variability, new user needs, attacks, intrusions, and faults. Approaches to complement software-based systems with self-managing and self-adaptive capabilities are an important area of research and development, offering solutions that leverage advances in fields such as software architecture, fault-tolerant computing, programming languages, run-time program analysis and verification, among others. Additionally, research in this field is informed by related areas such as control systems, machine learning, artificial intelligence, agent-based systems, and biologically inspired computing. The SEAMS symposium focuses on applying software engineering to these approaches, including methods, techniques, processes and tools that can be used to support self-* properties like self-protection, self-healing, self-optimization, and self-configuration.

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

Modern and emerging software systems, such as industrial Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, cloud and edge computing, robotics, and smart environments have to operate without interruption. Self-adaptation and self-management enable these systems to adapt themselves at runtime to preserve and optimize their operation in the presence of uncertain changes in their operating environment, resource variability, new user needs, attacks, intrusions, and faults.

Approaches to complement software-based systems with self-managing and self-adaptive capabilities are an important area of research and development, offering solutions that leverage advances in fields such as software architecture, fault-tolerant computing, programming languages, run-time program analysis and verification, among others. Additionally, research in this field is informed by related areas such as control systems, machine learning, artificial intelligence, agent-based systems, and biologically inspired computing. The SEAMS symposium focuses on applying software engineering to these approaches, including methods, techniques, processes and tools that can be used to support self-* properties like self-protection, self-healing, self-optimization, and self-configuration.

The objective of SEAMS is to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas to investigate, discuss, and examine the fundamental principles, the state of the art, and critical challenges of engineering self-adaptive and self-managing systems.

Topics of Interest:

All topics related to engineering self-adaptive and self-managing systems, including:

Foundational Concepts

• Self-* properties
• Understanding and taming uncertainty
• Runtime models and variability
• Consistent change of systems in operation
• Mixed-initiative and human-in-the-loop systems
• Situational awareness

Engineering Strategies

• Architecture and model-driven approaches
• Control theory
• Online analysis and planning
• Automatic synthesis techniques
• AI techniques (e.g. machine learning, game theory, …)
• Search-based techniques and learning

Engineering Activities

• Domain/environment analysis techniques
• Requirements elicitation techniques
• Architecture and design techniques
• Systematic reuse (e.g., patterns, viewpoints, reference architectures, code)
• Instrumentation of legacy systems (probing and effecting)
• Processes and methodologies
• DevOps

Analytical Methods

• Runtime decision-making (multi-objective, multi-layered, distributed)
• Analysis and testing frameworks
• Verification and validation
• Simulation

Languages

• Formal notations for modeling and analyzing self-* properties
• Domain-specific language support for self-adaptation
• Programming language support for self-adaptation

Application Areas

• Industrial internet of things
• Autonomous vehicles
• Cyber-physical systems
• Cloud and edge computing
• Robotics
• Smart environments
• Smart user interfaces
• Security and privacy

Artifacts & Evaluation

• Model problems and exemplars
• Resources including data sets, metrics, and software useful to compare self-adaptive approaches
• Real-world demonstrators
• Controlled experiments, case studies, replication studies, surveys

Types of Paper

SEAMS 2019 solicits different types of papers:

• Long papers (10 pages main text, inclusive of figures, tables, appendices, etc.; plus references up to two additional pages). Long papers should: (1) clearly describe innovative and original research, or (2) report a survey on a research topic in the field.

• New Ideas and Emergent Results (NIER) papers (6 pages + 1 page references). NIER papers should describe novel and promising ideas and/or techniques that are in an early stage of development. To that end, NIER papers will be reviewed with dedicated review guidelines.

• Industrial and experience papers (4 pages + 1 page references). An industrial and experience paper should describe the experiences gained from applying/evaluating engineering techniques of the field for real settings in practice. It is encouraged that the partners from practice join the effort as co-authors and that the paper reflects if possible the perspective of both sides. The papers should emphasize the value for the community, in particular, the lessons learned due to the transfer of research results to practice.

• Artifact papers (6 pages + 1 page references if standalone). Artifacts describe model problems, exemplars, or useful sets of resources for the broader SEAMS community. This year we solicit artifacts in two modalities: associated with a research paper and standalone. In the research paper modality, the artifact complements a long research paper and does not require a separate paper submission, the authors need to complete the self-assessment and attach their paper to the submission. The standalone modality requires the submission of an artifact paper (6 pages + 1 page references) in addition to a self-assessment form. The authors of accepted artifacts will have an ACM Artifact badge attached to their paper and given extra time to present it at SEAMS.

• Doctoral project papers (4 pages + 1 page references). A doctoral project paper should describe the dissertation research of a PhD student in the field of self-adaptive and self-managing systems. This paper has to be authored by the student only. A suggestion for structuring the paper is as follows:

  • The problem to be solved in your thesis (justify why this problem is important and make clear that previous research has not yet solved that problem).
  • Your research hypothesis (claim).
  • The expected contributions of your dissertation research.
  • How you plan to evaluate your results and to present credible evidence of your results to the community.
  • A description of the results achieved so far and a planned timeline for completion.

  Students of accepted papers will present their research during SEAMS and receive personalized and specific feedback on their research plan. Students will also have the opportunity to further engage with the audience during a poster session. Instructions for formatting posters will be provided after the notification. We encourage submissions from PhD students at any stage of their research.

• AI and Adaptivity (2 pages including references). SEAMS 2019 will orchestrate a panel session devoted to “artificial intelligence and adaptivity.” Interested authors are invited to submit an extended abstract in which they provide arguments either in favor or against the statement “adaptivity is a core property of intelligent systems”.

Download the Call for Papers from here.

SEAMS 2019 aims to continue to encourage its community members to build artifacts to drive, communicate, compare, and evaluate their research and results. In this spirit, SEAMS 2018 artifacts track exists to review, promote, share and catalog the research artifacts produced either as standalone or to support a full research paper.

According to ACM’s “Result and Artifact Review and Badging” policy, an “artifact” is “a digital object that was either created by the authors to be used as part of the study or generated by the experiment itself […] software systems, scripts used to run experiments, input datasets, raw data collected in the experiment, or scripts used to analyze results”. A formal review of such artifacts not only ensures that the study is repeatable by the same team, if they are available online then other researchers can replicate the findings as well. Hence, artifacts of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Tools, which are implementations of systems or algorithms potentially useful in other studies.
• Data repositories, which are data (e.g., logging data, system traces, survey raw data) that can be used for multiple software engineering approaches.
• Frameworks, which are tools and services illustrating new approaches to software engineering that could be used by other researchers in different contexts. This list is not exhaustive, but if your proposed artifact is not on this list, please email the chairs before submitting.

We solicit artifacts in two modalities:

• Standalone modality. Requires the submission of an artifact paper (6 pages + 1 page references) in addition to the self-assessment form. The paper should include a synopsis or description of the problem that is being addressed, a description of the context(s) in which the resource would be useful, a list of the challenges that it poses for self-adaptation, and examples of its use in at least one area of self-adaptive systems. Accepted papers and artifacts will be included in the proceedings, and authors will be given an opportunity to present their artefact at SEAMS.
• Research paper modality. The artifact complements a long research paper and does not require a separate paper submission. The authors needs to complete the self-assessment for and attach their paper to the submission. The authors will have an ACM Artifact badge attached to their paper and given extra time to present it at SEAMS.

There will be a best artifact award recognizing the work of authors who contribute the most useful artifact to the community. What do you get out of it? If your artifact is accepted, it will receive one of the following badges in the text of the paper and in the ACM Digital Library:

• Artifacts Evaluated - Functional: The artifacts are complete, well-documented and allow to obtain the same results as the paper.
• Artifacts Evaluated - Reusable: As above, but the artifacts are of such a high quality that they can be reused as is on other data sets, or for other purposes.

Furthermore, the following bonus badge is available on top of the previous:

• Artifacts Available: This badge ensures that the artifacts are available from a stable URL or DOI (i.e., not a personal website) for anyone to access. Some kind of 5 year-archival plan (at least) should be provided. Note that this badge of course excludes any proprietary data or tools. Regarding archival, all accepted artifacts will be indexed on https://github.com/researchart/. If desired, the artifacts themselves could be hosted there as a means of more permanent archival. Non-open source scripts and data could be considered as well for the artifacts track, but at least the reviewers should have access to them during the artifact review process.

How to submit?

To submit an artifact for your SEAMS 2018 paper, it is important to keep in mind: a) how accessible you are making your artifact to other researchers, and b) the fact that the artifact evaluators will have very limited time for making an assessment of each artifact. The configuration and installation for your artifact should take less than 30 minutes or it is unlikely to be endorsed simply because the committee will not have sufficient time to evaluate it. If you envision difficulties, please provide your artifact in the form of a virtual machine image (http://www.virtualbox.org) or a container image (http://www.docker.com).

Whichever the case, your artifact should be made available as a link to a github repository or to a single archive file using a widely available compressed archive format such as ZIP (.zip), tar and gzip (.tgz), or tar and bzip2 (.tbz2).

The repository or archive must:

1. be self-contained (with the exception of pointers to external tools or libraries; which we will not consider being part of the evaluated artifact, but which we will try to use when evaluating the artifact);

2. contain an HTML file called index.html that fully describes the artifact and includes (relative) links to the files (included in the archive) that constitute the artifact:

   • include a getting started guide that should stress the key elements of your artifact and that should enable the reviewers to run, execute or analyze your artifact without any technical difficulty;
   • include step-by-step instructions (another section within index.html) on how you propose to evaluate your artifact;
   • where appropriate, include descriptions of and links to files (included in the archive) that represent expected outputs (e.g., the log files expected to be generated by your tool on the given inputs).
3. contain the artifact itself, which may include, but is not limited to, source code, executables, data, a virtual machine image, and documents. Please use open formats for documents and we prefer experimental data to be submitted in csv format;
4. contain the submitted version of your research track paper;
5. optionally, authors are encouraged to submit a link to a short video (YouTube, max. 5 minutes) demonstrating the artifact.

To facilitate artifact review, the link to your artifact should be submitted to easychair within an artifact self-assessment form. Please put a short abstract in easychair as well that briefly summarizes the artifact (to help reviewers bid for your artifact).

Review Process and Selection Criteria

The artifact will be evaluated in relation to the expectations set by the self-assessment form and paper. Although reviewers will have access to your paper (via your repository or archive), please make very clear how they can run your artifact or analyze your data set to replicate your study, without them having to hunt for this. Reviewers may try to tweak provided inputs and create new ones, to test the limits of the system.

Artifacts will be scored using the following criteria:

• Artifacts Evaluated - Functional:
  • Documented: Is it accompanied by tutorial notes/videos and other documentation?
  • Consistent: The artifacts are relevant to the associated paper, and contribute in some inherent way to the generation of its main results.
  • Complete: To the extent possible, all components relevant to the paper in question are included. (Proprietary artifacts need not be included. If they are required to exercise the package then this should be documented, along with instructions on how to obtain them. Proxies for proprietary data should be included so as to demonstrate the analysis.)
  • Exercisable: If the artifact is executable, is it easy to download, install, or execute? Included scripts and/or software used to generate the results in the associated paper can be successfully executed, and included data can be accessed and appropriately manipulated.
• Artifacts Evaluated - Reusable: The artifacts associated with the paper are of a quality that significantly exceeds minimal functionality. That is, they have all the qualities of the Artifacts Evaluated – Functional level, but, in addition, they are very carefully documented and well-structured to the extent that reuse and repurposing is facilitated. In particular, norms and standards of the research community for artifacts of this type are strictly adhered to.
• Artifacts Available: Author-created artifacts relevant to this paper have been placed on a publically accessible archival repository that should be ensured for at least 5 years. A DOI or link to this repository along with a unique identifier for the object is provided.

Paper Submission Details and Review Process

All submitted papers and artifacts will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Papers must not have been previously published or concurrently submitted elsewhere. Papers must conform to the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTEX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf option), and submitted via EasyChair. Accepted papers will appear in the symposium proceedings that will be published in the ACM and IEEE digital libraries. The official publication date of an accepted paper will be the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE2019. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

Submission Sites

• For Long, NIER, and AI and Adaptivity papers: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=seams2019
• For Industrial and Experience papers: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=seams2019industrial
• For Artifact papers: http://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=seams2019artifacttra
• For Doctoral project papers: http://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=seams2019doctoraltra

• SEAMS 2018 in Gothenburgh, Sweden
• SEAMS 2017 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
• SEAMS 2016 in Austin, USA
• SEAMS 2015 in Florence, Italy
• SEAMS 2014 in Hyderabad, India
• SEAMS 2013 in San Francisco, USA
• SEAMS 2012 in Zürich, Switzerland
• SEAMS 2011 in Hawaii, USA
• SEAMS 2010 in Cape Town, South Africa
• SEAMS 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• SEAMS 2008 in Leipzig, Germany
• SEAMS 2007 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• SEAMS 2006 in Shanghai, China

SEAMS community page: http://self-adaptive.org

Symposia-related email should be addressed to: seams2019 [AT] list.waseda.jp

Follow and participate in SEAMS 2019 on Twitter, Facebook and Slack .