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The pervasiveness and growing complexity of software systems are challenging software engineering to design systems that can adapt their behavior to withstand unpredictable, uncertain, and continuously changing execution environments. Control theoretical adaptation mechanisms have received growing interest from the software engineering community in the last few years for their mathematical grounding, allowing formal guarantees on the behavior of the controlled systems. However, most of these mechanisms are tailored to specific applications and can hardly be generalized into broadly applicable software design and development processes.

This article discusses a reference control design process, from goal identification to the verification and validation of the controlled system. A taxonomy of the main control strategies is introduced, analyzing their applicability to software adaptation for both functional …