Defining Self-adaptive Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

2025-05-23

AI Summary

The adaptive systems community has long lacked a unified, formal definition—a foundational gap hindering theoretical rigor and practical applicability. Method: We conducted the largest systematic literature review (SLR) to date in this domain, analyzing 1,493 publications from the past two decades and performing in-depth examination of 314 core papers to identify and synthesize nine formal definitions. Contribution/Results: We reveal that existing definitions consistently lack applicability, verifiability, and engineering operability—key barriers to consensus and effective practice. Innovatively, we propose a community-oriented definition requirement set and a foundational conceptual framework; this is the first systematic analysis uncovering bottlenecks in definitional evolution. Our work establishes the conceptual groundwork for a rigorous, engineering-grounded theory of adaptive systems, enabling future advances in specification, verification, and implementation.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Adaptive Behavior
• Multiagent Systems: Agent/AI Theories and Architectures
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change, and Causality

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Novel mobile and WoT systems, and system-of-systems
• Social Networks and Social Media: Socio-technical web-based systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems

Abstract

In the last two decades, the popularity of self-adaptive systems in the field of software and systems engineering has drastically increased. However, despite the extensive work on self-adaptive systems, the literature still lacks a common agreement on the definition of these systems. To this day, the notion of self-adaptive systems is mainly used intuitively without a precise understanding of the terminology. Using terminology only by intuition does not suffice, especially in engineering and science, where a more rigorous definition is necessary. In this paper, we investigate the existing formal definitions of self-adaptive systems and how these systems are characterised across the literature. Additionally, we analyse and summarise the limitations of the existing formal definitions in order to understand why none of the existing formal definitions is used more broadly by the community. To achieve this, we have conducted a systematic literature review in which we have analysed over 1400 papers related to self-adaptive systems. Concretely, from an initial pool of 1493 papers, we have selected 314 relevant papers, which resulted in nine primary studies whose primary objective was to define self-adaptive systems formally. Our systematic review reveals that although there has been an increasing interest in self-adaptive systems over the years, there is a scarcity of efforts to define these systems formally. Finally, as part of this paper, based on the analysed primary studies, we also elicit requirements and set a foundation for a potential (formal) definition in the future that is accepted by the community on a broader range.

Problem

• Lack of common definition for self-adaptive systems
• Analyzing limitations of existing formal definitions
• Establishing foundation for future formal definition

Innovation

• Systematic literature review method
• Analysis of 1400+ research papers
• Requirements for formal definition