The 15th edition of the International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems will be colocated with ICSE 2020 and will be held virtually on June 29 - July 3, 2020. The objective of SEAMS is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government, to investigate, discuss, examine and advance the fundamental principles, the state of the art, and the solutions addressing critical challenges of engineering self-adaptive and self-managing systems.

Modern and emerging software systems ranging from industrial Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems to 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 including software architecture, fault-tolerant computing, programming languages, and run-time program analysis and verification. 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, to develop and advance methods, techniques, processes and tools that can be used to support self-* properties such as self-protection, self-healing, self-optimization, and self-configuration.

SEAMS Awards

• Most influential paper awards for SEAMS 2006 and SEAMS 2007
• Best full paper award
• Best student paper award (for best paper whose first author is a student)
• Best artefact award

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 augment software and software-controlled 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 academia, industry and government, to investigate, discuss, examine and advance the fundamental principles, the state of the art, and the solutions addressing 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
• Ethical challenges of self-adaptive systems

Engineering Strategies

• Architecture and model-driven approaches
• Control theory
• Online analysis and planning
• Decentralized control
• Automatic synthesis techniques
• AI techniques (machine learning, game theory, etc.)
• Search-based techniques and learning
• Simulation
• Mechanisms to ensure security and privacy in self-adaptive loops

Engineering Activities

• Domain/environment analysis techniques
• Requirements elicitation techniques
• Architecture and design techniques
• Verification and validation activities & frameworks
• Systematic reuse (patterns, viewpoints, reference architectures, code, etc.)
• Instrumentation of legacy systems (probing and effecting)
• Processes and methodologies
• Impact of DevOps on self-* systems

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
• Cyber-physical systems
• Cloud, fog and edge computing
• Bioengineering
• Robotics
• Smart environments
• Smart user interfaces
• Privacy and security

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 2020 solicits the following types of papers:

• Technical papers (10 pages main text, inclusive of figures, tables, appendices, etc.; plus references up to two additional pages). Technical 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.

• Experience papers (6 pages + 1 page references). An experience paper should describe the experiences gained from applying/evaluating software engineering research results in practice. It is encouraged that the partners from both practice and research join the effort as co-authors and that the paper reflects the perspective of both sides. The papers should emphasize the value of the experience for the community - in particular the lessons learned due to the transfer of research results to practice.

• Artifact papers (6 pages + 1 page references). 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 standalone modality requires the submission of an artifact paper (6 pages + 1 page references). The authors of accepted artifacts will have an ACM Artifact badge attached to their paper. All artifact papers will be presented at SEAMS.

• Demo papers (6 pages + 1 page references). Demo papers should demonstrate the use of self-adaptive software in a proof-of-concept, prototype or real-world application. Unlike artifact papers, these software systems may not be at a stage of development where they can be released to the broader SEAMS community for other researchers and practitioners to use them in their own work, or may not be suitable for release as artifacts.

• 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.

  Student authors 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.

• Special session papers on ethical concerns of self-adaptive systems (2 pages including references). SEAMS 2020 will organise a panel session devoted to ethical concerns associated with self-adaptive systems. Interested authors are invited to submit an extended abstract in which they identify, analyse and sketch potential solutions to the ethical challenges surrounding self-adaptive systems.

Download the Call for Papers from here.

SEAMS 2020 aims to continue to encourage its community members to build artifacts to drive, communicate, compare, and evaluate their research and results. In this spirit, the SEAMS 2020 artifacts track exists to review, promote, share, and catalog the research artifacts that bring value to the community.

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 ensures not only that the study is repeatable by the same team, but (if they are available online) also that other researchers can replicate the findings. Hence, artifacts of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Testbeds / Exemplars, which are implementations or detailed specifications of systems that pose and highlight fundamental or characteristic challenges in this community, and that self-adaptive systems should address.
• Datasets, which are data (e.g., logging data, system traces, survey raw data) that can be used to develop and evaluate multiple software engineering approaches.
• Tools / Frameworks, which are tools and services illustrating and implementing new approaches and algorithms potentially useful in other studies that are of benefit to 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. Note that if your work is not at a stage of development where it can be released as an artifact usable by the broader SEAMS community, you should consider submitting a demo paper to SEAMS 2020.

Submission

We solicit artifacts in two modalities:

• Standalone modality. Requires the submission of an artifact paper of max 6 pages + 1 page references (shorter papers are also acceptable if they provide all the necessary information). 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 artifact papers will be included in the proceedings, and authors will be given an opportunity to present their artifact at SEAMS.
• Research paper modality. The artifact complements a long research paper and does not require a separate paper submission. In this case, the artifact submission should contain only the abstract of the long research paper, along with a reference to the repository or archive that contains the artifact (see Packaging Guidelines below).

The authors of accepted artifacts will have an ACM Artifact badge attached to their paper. Authors will also be invited to archive their accepted artifacts on Dagstuhl Artifacts Series (DARTS) published in the Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server (DROPS). Each artifact will be assigned a DOI, separate from the companion paper, allowing the community to cite artifacts on their own.

There will be a best artifact award recognizing the work of authors who contribute the most useful artifact to the community.

Packaging Guidelines

When packaging your artifact, it is important to keep in mind: a) how accessible is the artifact to other researchers, and b) the fact that the artifact evaluators will have very limited time to assess each artifact. The setup 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 through a link to a Github repository (or a similar publicly accessible 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 archive or repository must:

1. be self-contained (with the exception of pointers to publicly available 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. This file should contain at least the following information:
   • a Getting Started section 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;
   • a Step-by-Step Instructions section on how you propose to evaluate your artifact;
   • where appropriate, 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 source code, executables, data, a virtual machine image, documents and other content deemed relevant by the authors. Please use open formats for documents; we prefer experimental data to be submitted in csv format.

Optionally, the authors are encouraged to submit a link to a short video (YouTube, max. 5 minutes) demonstrating the artifact.

Review Process and Selection Criteria

The artifact will be evaluated in relation to the expectations set by the paper. In addition to just running the artifact, the evaluators will read the paper and may try to tweak provided inputs and create new ones, to test the limits of the system.

Artifacts will be evaluated using the following criteria:

• Community value: Does the artifact bring value the community? Is this value clearly explained in the paper? Can the artifact be readily used by other researchers?
• Insightfulness: Does the artifact address or identify a gap in previous work?
• Timeliness: Does the artifact address a problem that is timely?
• Usability: Is it easy to understand? Is it accompanied by tutorial notes/videos and other documentation? If the artifact is executable, is it easy to download, install, and execute? Is it available online? Is it functional?

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 be submitted via EasyChair. Formatting instructions are available at https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template for both LaTeX and Word users. LaTeX users must use the provided acmart.cls and ACM-Reference-Format.bst without modification, enable the conference format in the preamble of the document (i.e., \documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}), and use the ACM reference format for the bibliography (i.e., \bibliographystyle{ACM-Reference-Format}). The review option adds line numbers, thereby allowing referees to refer to specific lines in their comments.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 ICSE2020. 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 Site

All papers should be submitted at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=seams2020.

• For Research, NIER, Experience, Demo, Doctoral Project, and Special Session papers: select “SEAMS 2020 Main Track”
• For Artifact papers: select “SEAMS 2020 Artifact Track”

Download the SEAMS 2020 Flyer from here!