Christoph Dorn

The emergence of socio-technical systems characterized by significant user collaboration poses a new challenge for system adaptation. People are no longer just the “users” of a system but an integral part. Traditional self-adaptation mechanisms, however, consider only the software system and remain unaware of the ramifications arising from collaboration interdependencies. By neglecting collective user behavior, an adaptation mechanism is unfit to appropriately adapt to evolution of user activities, consider side-effects on collaborations during the adaptation process, or anticipate negative consequence upon reconfiguration completion. Inspired by existing architecture-centric system adaptation approaches, I will make the case for a human architecture model and linking it to the runtime software architecture. I will introduce a mapping mechanism and corresponding framework that enables a system adaptation manager to reason upon the effect of software-level changes on human interactions and vice versa.