The 15th Workshop on Adaptive and Reflective Middleware (ARM 2016) follows on the success of over a decade of previous editions exploring how reflective approaches and associated techniques can support the life-cycle of adaptive middleware platforms. Such systems must adapt and tailor their behavior and properties to increasing levels of dynamism and unprecedented scales. Adaptation and reflection mechanisms must take into account novel models of computation and new classes of applications such as networked and cloud applications, the Internet of Things and their combination. Applying reflective techniques to open-up the implementation of middleware and related software platforms for interoperability, one-to-many deployment, and adaptability proved particularly successful and influential. Reflection by itself is today considered a baseline. Its combination with other software adaptation techniques has proven beneficial to extend the reach to different layers of the software stack. Further consolidating this approach can allow delivering the flexibility demanded by today’s ever diversifying middleware environments, which require higher and higher degrees of adaptability and resilience.

ARM 2016 aims at providing researchers with a leading edge view on the state of the art in reflective and adaptive middleware, and on the challenging problems that remain unsolved. This edition follows the path initiated in recent editions, by bringing together experts involved in designing and reusing adaptive systems at different system layers, including architectural, OS, virtualization technology, and network layers, as well as in using techniques that are complementary to reflection. The workshop will provide an exciting environment in which to leverage cooperation among researchers.

Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

    Design and performance of adaptive and/or reflective middleware platforms;
    Experiences with adaptive and reflective technologies in specific domains (e.g., sensor networks, ubiquitous/pervasive computing, mobile computing, Internet of Things, cloud/grid computing, P2P, Systems-of-Systems);
    Cross-layer interactions and adaptation mechanisms including network, OS, VM & device level techniques;
    Adaptation and reflection in the presence of heterogeneous execution and programming paradigms;
    Application of adaptive and reflective middleware techniques to achieve: reconfigurability and/or adaptability and/or separation of concerns; reuse; and reification of adaptation techniques and strategies;
    Incorporating non-functional properties into middleware: real-time, fault-tolerance, security, trust, privacy and so on;
    Fundamental developments in the theory and practice of reflection, adaptation and control, as it relates to middleware and its interaction with other layers;
    Techniques to improve performance and/or scalability of adaptive and reflective mechanisms;
    Evaluation methodologies for adaptive and reflective middleware; guidelines, testbeds and benchmarks;
    Approaches to maintain the integrity of adaptive and reflective technologies; convergence of adaptation.
    Tool support for adaptive and reflective middleware;
    Design and programming abstractions to manage the complexity of adaptive and reflective mechanisms;
    Software engineering methodologies for the design and development of adaptive middleware;
    Methods for reasoning, storing and dynamically updating knowledge about the services provided by adaptive/reflective middleware;
    The role of techniques such as learning in the design of long-lived adaptive middleware;
    Methods for asynchronous, distributed, control, coordination/cooperation among components providing middleware services;
    Metrics on properties such as cost-of-adaptation, quality-of-adaptation, consistency-of-adaptation, yields.

Publication of Accepted Papers

All accepted papers will appear in a Middleware 2016 companion proceedings, which will be available in the ACM Digital Library prior to the workshop.

At least one of the authors will have to register for the workshop and present the paper.

Authors should also acknowledge the following disclaimer by the ACM: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference is over, the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.)