TY - INPR A1 - Petrovska, Ana A1 - Erjiage, Guan A1 - Kugele, Stefan T1 - Defining Self-adaptive Systems: A Systematic Literature Review N2 - 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. UR - https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.17798 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.17798 UR - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:573-61576 PB - arXiv CY - Ithaca ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Petrovska, Ana A1 - Kugele, Stefan A1 - Hutzelmann, Thomas A1 - Beffart, Theo A1 - Bergemann, Sebastian A1 - Pretschner, Alexander T1 - Defining adaptivity and logical architecture for engineering (smart) self-adaptive cyber–physical systems JF - Information and Software Technology UR - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2022.106866 Y1 - 2022 UR - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2022.106866 SN - 0950-5849 VL - 2022 IS - 147 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Kugele, Stefan A1 - Petrovska, Ana A1 - Gerostathopoulos, Ilias ED - Biffl, Stefan ED - Navarro, Elena ED - Löwe, Welf ED - Sirjani, Marjan ED - Mirandola, Raffaela ED - Weyns, Danny T1 - Towards a Taxonomy of Autonomous Systems T2 - Software Architecture: 15th European Conference, ECSA 2021; Virtual Event, Sweden, September 13–17, 2021: Proceedings UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86044-8_3 KW - Autonomous systems KW - Taxonomy KW - Architecture Y1 - 2021 UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86044-8_3 SN - 978-3-030-86044-8 SN - 978-3-030-86043-1 SP - 37 EP - 45 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Petrovska, Ana A1 - Hutzelmann, Thomas A1 - Kugele, Stefan T1 - A Theoretical Framework for Self-Adaptive Systems: Specifications, Formalisation, and Architectural Implications T2 - SAC '23: Proceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3555776.3577665 KW - self-adaptive systems KW - theoretical framework KW - minimum requirements KW - formalisation KW - architectural implication Y1 - 2023 UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3555776.3577665 SN - 978-1-4503-9517-5 SP - 1440 EP - 1449 PB - ACM CY - New York ER -