Towards a Formal Approach for Prototyping and Verifying Self-Adaptive Systems

Software adaptation is becoming increasingly important as more and more applications need to dynamically adapt their structure and behavior to cope with changing contexts, available resources and user requirements. Maude is a high-performance reflective language and system, supporting both equational and rewriting logic specification and programming for a wide range of applications. In this paper we describe our experience in using Maude for prototyping and verifying self-adaptive systems. In order to illustrate the benefits of adopting a formal approach based on Maude to develop self-adaptive systems we present a case study in the robotics domain.