Feature-Oriented Model-Driven Development of Energy-Aware Self-Adaptive Software

Abstract

Smartphone applications are equipped with energy-hungry resources such as display, GPS, and GPU. Mishandling of these resources and associated APIs might result in an abnormal battery drain. In recent years, researchers have adopted self-adaptive strategies to extend battery life with context information. However, the existing solutions focus on the development and testing phases of software development. Handling the energy-awareness and self-adaptive behavior directly at the development phase would increase the development efforts. Therefore, there is a need to consider these requirements in the early phases of software development life cycle. Thus, in this research work, the concepts of feature modeling, domain-specific modeling languages, and code generation has been adopted to model and develop energy-aware self-adaptive software. The location-based applications have been selected as an application domain to prove the efficacy of the ideas presented in this research work. In addition, a self-adaptive system has been selected as a system domain, and Android has been selected as an operating domain. The first objective aims to empirically analyze and organize the developer’s existing knowledge about energy-saving solutions for location-based applications. The second objective aims to aid the domain analyst with an energy-aware modeling framework by extending the popular feature-oriented domain analysis framework. The third objective aims to develop a domain-specific modeling tool (eSAP) for the energy-aware modeling framework. The fourth objective aims to design and develop a tool named eGEN, which includes a textual domain-specific modeling language and automatic code generator. eGEN helps the domain analyst and developers specify energy-related requirements and generates battery-aware source code that can be used in the existing location-based Android applications. The efficacy of the energyaware modeling framework and developed tools has been validated qualitatively using the case studies in software engineering. The obtained results show that the developed tools eSAP and eGEN help the domain analyst and developers reduce the development efforts for introducing energy-awareness and self-adaptivity in the early phases of software development.