17th Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing SystemsSEAMS 2022

SEAMS 2022 Goes Virtual

Considering the current evolving situation around the COVID-19 pandemic, and to provide some certainty to potential SEAMS participants, we have decided to make SEAMS 2022 a virtual-first (remote) event. The technical program of SEAMS 2022 will be held in a virtual format on the 18, 19, and 20 of May. For those who wish to attend in person, the physical event will be held in Pittsburgh on the 23rd of May (2022), co-located with the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2022).

SEAMS Vision

We are building today an exciting future in which autonomous vehicles navigate complex environments, smart cities help to solve public problems and achieve a higher quality of life, and service robots support social care workers or perform tasks that are too dangerous for humans. All these software-intensive systems need to continuously preserve and optimize their operation in the presence of uncertain changes in their operating environment, resource variability, evolving user needs, attacks and faults. In addition to that, the complexity of these systems demands autonomy, self-management, and self-adaptation. SEAMS is a CORE-A ranked conference that focuses on applying software engineering methods, techniques, processes and tools to support the construction of safe, performant, and cost-effective self-adaptive and autonomous systems that provide self-* properties like self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimization, and self-protection.

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.

Accepted Papers

Artifacts

SEAMS 2022 continues to encourage its community members to build dedicated artifacts that support driving, communicating, comparing, and evaluating their research on software engineering for adaptive and self-managing systems. In this spirit, the SEAMS 2022 artifacts track exists to review, promote, share, and catalog research artifacts that bring value to the community.

NOTE: While this call is about dedicated artifacts, we also encourage authors to submit artifacts used for their long research papers to SEAMS 2022. Although the two submissions are independent (i.e., the artifact has its own artifact paper), if both are accepted, the badges awarded to the artifact paper will be awarded to the research paper too.

Types of Artifacts

According to ACM’s "Artifact Review and Badging (Version 1.1)” 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. For example, artifacts can be 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 promotes artifacts of high quality that in turn promote reproducibility and replicability of research results and that drive the research of the whole SEAMS community. Hence, artifacts of interest for SEAMS 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, sensor data, system traces, survey raw data) that can be used to develop, evaluate, and compare self-adaptation approaches.
• Frameworks, which are tools and services illustrating and implementing self-adaptation techniques or algorithms that are potentially useful in different contexts and that other researchers could use and customize to specific contexts.

Thus, frameworks primarily support developing self-adaptation approaches whereas testbeds / exemplars and datasets particularly support evaluating and comparing different approaches. However, this list is not exhaustive. If your proposed artifact is not on this list, please email the Artifacts Chair before submitting.

Quality of Artifacts

According to the ACM’s "Artifact Review and Badging (Version 1.1)” policy, SEAMS aims for artifacts that are available and reusable so that other researchers can access and build upon the artifacts to drive research in the overall SEAMS community. Thus, artifacts have to be made permanently available—latest after acceptance and before publication of the artifact—using publisher repositories (ACM or IEEE), institutional repositories, or open (commercial) repositories (e.g., figshare, Zenodo, or GitHub/Zenodo) that provide permanent and unique identifiers for the artifacts. Personal web pages are not acceptable for this purpose. Moreover, artifacts should be reusable by other researchers. To facilitate reuse, they should be carefully documented, well-structured, complete, exercisable, as well as appropriately verified and validated (e.g., use of the artifact in a study).

Submission of Artifacts

Submission includes an artifact paper and the artifact itself. The paper should be submitted via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=seams2022). The artifact can also be submitted via EasyChair, or preferably via a link provided in the paper. Artifacts must not have been previously published or concurrently submitted elsewhere.

Artifact Paper

An artifact paper is of max 6 pages + 1 page references. It should include a synopsis or description of the problem that is being addressed, a description of the context(s) in which the artifact 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 2022.

Artifact papers must conform to the formatting guidelines reported in the submission page . There will be a best artifact award recognizing the work of authors who contribute the most useful artifact to the community. Moreover, we will do our best to work with the IEEE Xplore and ACM Portal administrator to add badges to the electronic versions of the authors’ paper(s).

Artifact

Authors must perform the following steps to submit an artifact:

Packaging the Artifact

When packaging your artifact, it is important to keep in mind: a) how accessible the artifact is to other researchers, and b) the fact that the artifact evaluators 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 with a working environment in a VirtualBox VM image or a Docker container image so that the artifact can be run and exercised. Otherwise, the artifact can be packaged in a single archive file (zip or tar.gz) or its code base can be provided by a public repository. In either case, the artifact should be exercisable and appropriately validated.

Documenting the Artifact

To facilitate reuse, an artifact should be complete and carefully documented. Therefore, it must:

• be self-contained, that is, it contains 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 (e.g., csv for data). Publicly available external tools or libraries used to exercise and use the artifact do not have to be included in the artifact;
• include documentation that describes the artifact and especially the information requested in the following bullets. It is acceptable to refer to the artifact paper for a more detailed description of the artifact. The entry point to the documentation should be easy to identify (e.g., README.md or index.html file in the top-level directory of the artifact). The documentation should include:
  • 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. In this context, requirements and side effects of running the artifact should be discussed.
  • step-by-step instructions (e.g., tutorial style) for how to download, install, run, and “play” the artifact, and how to check the results of the execution. These instructions should both show how you propose to evaluate your artifact, and be useful for a new user of your artifact to get started.
  • where appropriate, descriptions of and links to files (included in the archive or generated by executing the artifact) that represent expected outputs (e.g., the log files expected to be generated by the artifact on the given inputs).
  • if applicable, descriptions of how the artifact can be customized and extended to be reused in a different research context of self-adaptive systems.
• include a license file or statement describing the distribution rights. Note that a reusable artifact requires some kind of open source license.

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

Making the Artifact Available

Regardless of the packaging, the artifact should be made available to the artifact reviewers through a link to a public repository (e.g., GitHub) or to a single archive file.

Artifacts accepted to the SEAMS 2022 program have to be made permanently available to the public by the time the camera ready version of the paper is due. This must be done using an archival repository such as publisher repositories at ACM or IEEE, institutional repositories, or open (commercial) repositories such as figshare and Zenodo. For instance, Zenodo supports archiving snapshots of GitHub repositories and provides DOIs for such snapshots.

Review Process and Selection Criteria

All submitted artifacts will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Each artifact will be evaluated in relation to the expectations set by the artifact 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 to the SEAMS 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 complete and easy to understand? Is it carefully documented and well-structured? Is it accompanied by tutorial notes? and other documentation? Is it exercisable? If the artifact is executable, is it easy to download, install, and execute? Has it been validated? Is it functional? Is it reusable?

Research

We are building today an exciting future in which autonomous vehicles navigate complex environments, smart cities help to solve public problems and achieve a higher quality of life, and service robots support social care workers or perform tasks that are too dangerous for humans. All these software-intensive systems need to continuously preserve and optimize their operation in the presence of uncertain changes in their operating environment, resource variability, evolving user needs, attacks and faults. In addition to that, the complexity of these systems demands autonomy, self-management, and self-adaptation. SEAMS is a CORE-A ranked conference that focuses on applying software engineering methods, techniques, processes and tools to support the construction of safe, performant, and cost-effective self-adaptive and autonomous systems that provide self-* properties like self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimization, and self-protection.

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. We welcome research contributions on all topics related to engineering self-adaptive, self-managing, and autonomous systems, including:

Foundational Concepts

• Self-* properties
• Uncertainty
• Runtime models and variability
• Mixed-initiative and human-in-the-loop
• Ethical challenges

Engineering Strategies

• AI and machine learning
• Automatic synthesis techniques
• Control theory
• Search-based techniques
• Model checking
• Simulation and digital twins

Engineering Activities

• Domain/environment analysis
• Requirements elicitation
• Architecture and design
• Verification and validation
• Systematic reuse
• Processes and methodologies

Languages

• Formal notations for self-* properties
• Domain specific languages
• Programming language support

…and all application areas and domains, including but not limited to: industrial internet of things, cyber-physical systems, cloud/fog/edge computing, bioengineering, robotics, smart environments, smart user interfaces, privacy and security.

We solicit three types of papers:

• Research papers (10 pages content + 2 pages of references): papers offering novel and mature research contributions, as well as experiences gained from applying or evaluating research results in practice.

• Short papers (6 pages content + 1 page of references): papers presenting ongoing research or new research ideas without a complete evaluation.

• Community Debate on Digital Twins for Adaptive Systems (2 pages including references, or five minute video): Participants from industry and academia, who would like to participate in the SEAMS 2022 community debate, are strongly encouraged to contribute to this debate on the following position statement: “A digital twin is both a digital shadow reflecting the status and operation of its physical twin and a digital thread―recording the evolution of the physical twin over time. Digital twins of self-adaptive and self-managing systems not only help their engineers, developers, operators understand how such systems perform now and, in the future, but also facilitate their continuous integration and delivery.”

Detailed submission instructions can be found in the dedicated page.

We also encourage the submissions of artifacts that are functional, reusable, available, replicated, or reproduced (either together with research papers or as standalone contributions). Artifacts should be submitted to the artifact track (please refer to the Call for Artifacts for further information). Accepted research papers whose artifact submission has been positively evaluated in the artifact track will receive corresponding artifact badges.

Accepted papers will appear in the SEAMS 2022 proceedings that will be published in the IEEE and ACM digital libraries. The official publication date is the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. Purchase of additional pages in the proceedings is not allowed.

Authors of selected research papers will be invited to submit revised and extended versions of their work to ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS).

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for and attend SEAMS 2022 and present the paper. The presentation is expected to be delivered in person, unless this is impossible due to travel limitations (related to, e.g., health, visa, or COVID-19 prevention).

Doctoral Symposium

The goal of the SEAMS 2022 Doctoral Track is to create a forum for PhD students working in the area of Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing systems. Participants will have the opportunity to present and discuss their doctoral research with senior researchers in the SEAMS community, in a constructive and friendly atmosphere. Specifically, the track aims to:

• Provide a setting whereby students receive feedback on their doctoral research and guidance on future directions from the Doctoral Track Panel;
• Foster the creation of a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research; and
• Contribute to the conference goals through the interaction between the participants and other researchers at the main conference.

In addition to scientific matters, students will have the opportunity to seek advice on various aspects of completing a PhD and performing research as a young professional in software engineering. Submissions (exclusively authored by the doctoral student) are invited from students who have settled on a general doctoral dissertation area, but are still sufficiently far away from completion to be able to take advantage of the given feedback. Students should be at least a year from completion of their dissertation (at the time of the conference). The Doctoral Track has the same scope of technical topics as the main SEAMS conference.

Submission

Submissions should present research in progress that is intended to lead to a doctoral dissertation, using the following structure:

• Problem: The problem the research intends to solve, the target audience of this research, and a motivation of why the problem is important and needs to be solved.
• Related work: A review of the relevant related work, with an emphasis on how the proposed approach is different and what advantages it has over the existing state of the art.
• Proposed solution: A description of the proposed solution and which other work (e.g., methods or tools) it depends on.
• Plan for evaluation and validation: A description of how it will be shown that the work does indeed solve the targeted problem and is superior to the existing state of the art (e.g., prototyping, industry case studies, user studies, experiments).
• Expected contributions: A list of the expected contributions to both theory and practice.
• Current status: A description of the work to-date, results achieved so far and a proposed planned timeline for completion.

Students at the initial stage of their research might have some difficulty in addressing some of these instructions, but should make the best attempt. Submissions should be single-authored and include the title of your research, your name, your advisor, your email address, a short summary in the style of an abstract for a regular paper, and a text body that covers the points above. Submission must not exceed 4 pages plus 1 page for references. To check the formatting guidelines, see the submission page. All papers have to be submitted electronically in PDF format. Submissions will be accepted through EasyChair. All submissions must be original work, and must not have been previously published, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (see also ACM policy and procedures with respect to plagiarism). Important note: differently from the Research Track, Doctoral Track papers are NOT double-blind, and therefore must contain the author’s name.

Detailed submission instructions can be found in the dedicated page.

Evaluation

The Doctoral Track Panel will select participants using the following criteria:

• Quality of the research proposal and its relevance to SEAMS;
• Quality of proposal presentation.

All accepted submissions will be part of the SEAMS 2022 Satellite Events proceedings and published in the ACM Digital Library.

Acceptance

All authors of accepted contributions will receive further instructions for preparing their camera-ready versions. Authors must register for the SEAMS 2022 Doctoral Track and present their work at the conference. Authors will also have the possibility to present a poster at the main conference.

Industry

Software is playing an increasing role in any domain and almost every system has, at least in some components, a degree of autonomy, e.g. sharing control with humans.

The industrial track is a new track of SEAMS introduced in this edition with the aim of creating cross-fertilization between academia and industry. We aim at involving practitioners interested in sharing their knowledge, experience, lessons learned, best practices, failures, challenges, and opportunities in engineering and/or managing autonomous, adaptive, and self-managing systems or components.

The SEAMS symposium is interested in software engineering aspects of any kind of autonomous, adaptive, and self-managing systems or components, including approaches coming from related areas such as control systems, machine learning, artificial intelligence, agent-based systems, and biologically inspired computing.

In-practice track papers should address the application of software engineering practices (thus including works on principles, techniques, tools, methods, processes) to a specific domain or to the development of autonomous, adaptive, and self-managing systems or components. We expect in-practice track papers to be of interest to software development professionals.

Topics of interest

• Engineering for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI)
• Engineering for control systems
• Development processes for autonomous, adaptive, and self-managing systems or components
• Techniques, tools, methods for engineering, architecting, modeling, verifying, testing autonomous, adaptive, and self-managing systems or components
• Experience reports on the development of autonomous, adaptive, and self-managing systems or components
• Organization changes required by the development of autonomous, adaptive, and self-managing systems or components
• Emerging business aspects related to the autonomous, adaptive, and self-managing systems or components
• Ethical aspects of autonomous, adaptive, and self-managing systems or components
• Any application area would be of interest.

Types of papers

The in-practice track of SEAMS 2022 welcomes the following types of papers:

• SEAMS in-practice papers (up to 10 pages, including references): address real-world experience, failures, challenges, and opportunities of autonomous, adaptive, and self-managing systems or components through systematic investigations. Papers should describe industry-relevant experiences and best practices and an in-depth discussion of results and lessons learned. The evaluation criteria for submissions include potential impact, repeatability, and a real-world focus. Accepted papers will appear in the proceedings.

• Self-nominated invited industrial talks (2 pages of abstract, talk organization - possibly video recording, and description of speaker(s)): must feature current trends in the industry on the engineering and/or management of autonomous, adaptive, and self-managing systems or components. Talks should present ideas that are both inspirational and informative. Proposals should make clear why the talk is interesting to attendees of the in-practice track of SEAMS 2022. The duration of accepted talks is 30 minutes. Extended abstracts of the accepted talks will appear in the proceedings.

Detailed submission instructions can be found in the dedicated page.

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