Environment Modeling for Adaptive Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract: [Context & Motivation] Adaptive systems are an important research area. The dominant reason for adaptivity in systems are changes in the environment. Thus, it is an important question how to model the environment and how to determine the necessary information on this environment in the requirements engineering phase. [Question/ Problem] There is so far relatively little explicit study of the notion of environment models in software engineering research. [Principal ideas/ Results] In this paper, we present a systematic literature review with the goal to determine the state of the art in environment modeling for adaptive systems, in particular from a requirements perspective. We discuss the goals of the approaches, the modeling concepts, as well as the methodology aspects of environment modeling in our survey. [Contribution] As major result of our survey, we provide a meta-model of existing environment modeling concepts. As a negative finding - and a research opportunity - we find that so far methodological aspects of environment modeling have received very little attention.