SEAMS 2021 will be colocated with ICSE 2021 and held in Madrid, May 23-24, 2021.

Modern and emerging software systems, such as industrial Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, cloud and edge computing, robotics, and smart environments have to operate without interruption. Self-adaptation and self-management enable these systems to adapt themselves at runtime to preserve and optimize their operation in the presence of uncertain changes in their operating environment, resource variability, new user needs, attacks, intrusions, and faults. Approaches to complement software-based systems with self-managing and self-adaptive capabilities are an important area of research and development, offering solutions that leverage advances in fields such as software architecture, fault-tolerant computing, programming languages, run-time program analysis and verification, among others. Additionally, research in this field is informed by related areas such as control systems, machine learning, artificial intelligence, agent-based systems, and biologically inspired computing. The SEAMS symposium focuses on applying software engineering to these approaches, including methods, techniques, processes and tools that can be used to support self-* properties like self-protection, self-healing, self-optimization, and self-configuration

Call for Papers

Modern and emerging software systems, such as industrial Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, cloud and edge computing, robotics, and smart environments have to operate without violating their quality requirements. Self-adaptation and self-management enable these systems to adapt themselves at runtime to preserve and optimize their operation in the presence of uncertain changes in their operating environment, resource variability, evolving user needs, attacks, intrusions, and faults. Approaches to augment software and software-controlled systems with self-managing and self-adaptive capabilities are an important area of research and development, offering solutions that leverage advances in fields such as software architecture, fault-tolerant computing, programming languages, run-time program analysis and verification, among others. Additionally, research in this field is informed by related areas such as control systems, machine learning, artificial intelligence, agent-based systems, and biologically inspired computing. SEAMS focuses on applying software engineering to these approaches, including methods, techniques, processes and tools that can be used to support self-* properties, like, self-protection, self healing, self-optimization, and self-configuration. The objective of SEAMS is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry and government, to investigate, discuss, examine and advance the fundamental principles, the state of the art, and the solutions addressing critical challenges of engineering self-adaptive and self-managing systems.

Topics of Interest:

All topics related to engineering self-adaptive and self-managing systems, including:

Foundational Concepts

• Self-* properties
• Understanding and taming uncertainty
• Runtime models and variability
• Mixed-initiative and human-in-the-loop systems
• Situational awareness
• Ethical challenges of self-adaptive systems

Engineering Strategies

• Control theory
• Online analysis and planning
• Decentralized control
• Automatic synthesis techniques
• AI techniques
• Search-based techniques and learning
• Simulation

Engineering Activities

• Domain/environment analysis techniques
• Requirements elicitation techniques
• Architecture and design techniques
• Verification and validation activities & frameworks
• Systematic reuse (patterns, viewpoints, reference architectures, code, etc.)
• Instrumentation of legacy systems (probing and effecting)
• Processes and methodologies

Languages

• Formal notations for modeling and analyzing self-* properties
• Domain-specific language support for self-adaptation
• Programming language support for self-adaptation

Application Areas

• Industrial Internet of Things
• Cyber-physical systems
• Cloud, fog and edge computing
• Bioengineering
• Robotics
• Smart environments
• Smart user interfaces
• Privacy and security

Types of Papers:

SEAMS 2021 solicits the following types of papers:

• Long papers (10 pages main text, inclusive of figures, tables, appendices, etc.; plus references up to two additional pages): papers offering novel and mature research contributions, including:

  • Technical papers that clearly describe an innovative and original technical contribution.
  • Empirical study that evaluates or compares existing techniques or derives relevant findings using a research method (experiment, survey, case study, grounded theory, …).
  • Literature review on a research topic in the field.

  Authors of long papers are encouraged to submit their supplementary material for recognition of artifacts that are functional, reusable, available, replicated, or reproduced. Accepted long papers whose supplementary material has been evaluated positively will receive corresponding artifact badges. To submit supplementary material, an extra one page abstract (not included in the proceedings) should be attached to the submitted long paper, which describes the material, provides information to access the material, supports the evaluation of the material, and justifies why the material deserves the badges the authors are applying for.

• Short papers (6 pages + 1 page references): papers that have smaller scope and/or contribution. This type of papers also includes:

  • New Ideas and Emergent Results (NIER) papers, which describe novel and promising ideas and/or techniques that are in an early stage of development.
  • Experience papers that describe the experiences gained from applying/evaluating software engineering research results in practice.
  • Artifact papers, which describe model problems, exemplars, or sets of resources (e.g., data sets, tools, and frameworks) that are useful for the broader SEAMS community to develop, evaluate, and compare self-adaptation approaches. Please, check the specific call for this type of paper at following link

• Demo papers (2 pages + 1 page references): papers that should demonstrate the use of self-adaptive software in a proof-of-concept, prototype or real-world application. The paper should contain a URL to a demonstration video of no more than five minutes in duration explaining the working of the application.

• Community debate papers (2 pages including references): Researchers who want to participate in the community debate (see above) are invited to write a motion either in favour or against the statement “handling unanticipated changes is the ultimate challenge for self-adaptation.”

Accepted papers will appear in the SEAMS 2021 proceedings that will be published in the IEEE and ACM digital libraries. The official publication date is the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. Purchases of additional pages in the proceedings are not allowed.

Conference Attendance Expectation

If a submission is accepted, at least one author of the paper is required to register for and attend SEAMS 2021 and present the paper. The presentation is expected to be delivered in person, unless this is impossible due to travel limitations (related to, e.g., health, visa, or COVID-19 prevention).

SEAMS 2021 continues to encourage its community members to build dedicated artifacts that support driving, communicating, comparing, and evaluating their research on software engineering for adaptive and self-managing systems. In this spirit, the SEAMS 2021 artifacts track exists to review, promote, share, and catalog research artifacts that bring value to the community.

NOTE: While this call is about dedicated artifacts, we also encourage authors to submit supplementary material together with their long research papers to SEAMS 2021. In this case, long papers accepted at SEAMS 2021 will be awarded with badges if the reviewers of the paper evaluate positively the supplementary material. Please check the SEAMS 2021 Call for Papers for how to submit supplementary material.

Types of Artifacts

According to ACM’s "Artifact Review and Badging (Version 1.1)” policy, an artifact is “a digital object that was either created by the authors to be used as part of the study or generated by the experiment itself. For example, artifacts can be software systems, scripts used to run experiments, input datasets, raw data collected in the experiment, or scripts used to analyze results.” A formal review of such artifacts promotes artifacts of high quality that promotes reproducibility and replicability of research results and that drive the research of the whole SEAMS community. Hence, artifacts of interest for SEAMS include but are not limited to:

• Testbeds / Exemplars, which are implementations or detailed specifications of systems that pose and highlight fundamental or characteristic challenges in this community, and that self-adaptive systems should address.
• Datasets, which are data (e.g., logging data, sensor data, system traces, survey raw data) that can be used to develop, evaluate, and compare self-adaptation approaches.
• Frameworks, which are tools and services illustrating and implementing self-adaptation techniques or algorithms that are potentially useful in different contexts and that other researchers could use and customize to specific contexts.

Thus, frameworks primarily support developing self-adaptation approaches whereas testbeds / exemplars and datasets particularly support evaluating and comparing different approaches. However, this list is not exhaustive. If your proposed artifact is not on this list, please email the Artifacts Chair before submitting.

Quality of Artifacts

According to the ACM’s "Artifact Review and Badging (Version 1.1)” policy, SEAMS aims for artifacts that are available and reusable so that other researchers can access and built upon the artifacts to drive research in the overall SEAMS community. Thus, artifacts have to be made permanently available—latest after acceptance and before publication of the artifact—using publisher repositories (ACM or IEEE), institutional repositories, or open (commercial) repositories (e.g., figshare, Zenodo, or GitHub/Zenodo) that provide permanent and unique identifiers for the artifacts. Personal web pages are not acceptable for this purpose. Moreover, artifacts should be reusable by other researchers. To facilitate reuse, they should be carefully documented, well-structured, complete, exercisable, as well as appropriately verified and validated (e.g., use of the artifact in a study).

Note that if your work is not at a stage of development where it can be released as an artifact usable by the broader SEAMS community, you should consider submitting a demo paper to SEAMS 2021.

Submission of Artifacts

Submission includes an artifact paper and the artifact itself. The paper should be submitted via EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=seams2021). The artifact can also be submitted via EasyChair, or preferably via a link provided in the paper. Artifacts must not have been previously published or concurrently submitted elsewhere.

Artifact Paper

An artifact paper is of max 6 pages + 1 page references. It should include a synopsis or description of the problem that is being addressed, a description of the context(s) in which the artifact would be useful, a list of the challenges that it poses for self-adaptation, and examples of its use in at least one area of self-adaptive systems. Accepted artifact papers will be included in the proceedings, and authors will be given an opportunity to present their artifact at SEAMS 2021.

Artifact papers must conform to the IEEE formatting instructions IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).

There will be a best artifact award recognizing the work of authors who contribute the most useful artifact to the community. Moreover, we will do our best to work with the IEEE Xplore and ACM Portal administrator to add badges to the electronic versions of the authors’ paper(s).

Artifact

Authors must perform the following steps to submit an artifact:

Packaging the Artifact

When packaging your artifact, it is important to keep in mind: a) how accessible the artifact is to other researchers, and b) the fact that the artifact evaluators have very limited time to assess each artifact. The setup for your artifact should take less than 30 minutes or it is unlikely to be endorsed simply because the committee will not have sufficient time to evaluate it. If you envision difficulties, please provide your artifact with a working environment in a VirtualBox VM image or a Docker container image so that the artifact can be run and exercised. Otherwise, the artifact can be packaged in a single archive file (zip or tar.gz) or its code base can be provided by a public repository.

In either case, the artifact should be exercisable and appropriately validated.

Making the Artifact Available

Regardless of the packaging, the artifact should be made available to the artifact reviewers through a link to a public repository (e.g., GitHub) or to a single archive file.

Latest after acceptance and before publication of artifacts in the SEAMS 2021 program, artifacts have to be made permanently available to the public using an archival repository (e.g., publisher repositories at ACM or IEEE, institutional repositories, or open (commercial) repositories such as figshare and Zenodo). For instance, Zenodo supports archiving snapshots of GitHub repositories and provides DOIs for such snapshots.

Documenting the Artifact

To facilitate reuse, an artifact should be complete and carefully documented. Therefore, it must:

• be self-contained, that is, it contains the artifact itself, which may include source code, executables, data, a virtual machine image, documents and other content deemed relevant by the authors. Please use open formats for documents (e.g., csv for data). Publicly available external tools or libraries used to exercise and use the artifact do not have to be included in the artifact;
• include a documentation that fully describes the artifact and especially the following information:
• a Getting Started section that should stress the key elements of your artifact and that should enable the reviewers to run, execute or analyze your artifact without any technical difficulty. In this context, requirements and side effects of running the artifact should be discussed.
• a Step-by-Step Instructions section on how you propose to evaluate your artifact, e.g., a tutorial-style document describing how to download, install, run, and “play” the artifact, and how to check the results of the execution.
• where appropriate, descriptions of and links to files (included in the archive or generated by executing the artifact) that represent expected outputs (e.g., the log files expected to be generated by the artifact on the given inputs).
• if applicable, descriptions of how the artifact can be customized and extended to be reused in a different research context of self-adaptive systems.
• include a license file or statement describing the distribution rights. Note that a reusable artifact requires some of open source license.

Optionally, the authors are encouraged to submit a link to a short video (YouTube, max. 5 minutes) demonstrating the artifact.

Review Process and Selection Criteria

All submitted artifact will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Each artifact will be evaluated in relation to the expectations set by the artifact paper. In addition to just running the artifact, the evaluators will read the paper and may try to tweak provided inputs and create new ones, to test the limits of the system.

Artifacts will be evaluated using the following criteria: * Community value: Does the artifact bring value to the SEAMS community? Is this value clearly explained in the paper? Can the artifact be readily used by other researchers? * Insightfulness: Does the artifact address or identify a gap in previous work? * Timeliness: Does the artifact address a problem that is timely? * Usability: Is it complete and easy to understand? Is it carefully documented and well-structured? Is it accompanied by tutorial notes? and other documentation? Is it exercisable? If the artifact is executable, is it easy to download, install, and execute? Has it been validated? Is it functional? Is it reusable?

Paper Submission Details and Review Process

All submitted papers and artifacts will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. Papers must not have been previously published or concurrently submitted elsewhere.

Submissions must conform to the IEEE formatting instructions IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines (title in 24pt font and full text in 10pt type, LaTeX users must use \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf options).

Papers must be submitted via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=seams2021

All types of papers should be submitted via EasyChair. Community debate and Artifact papers should be submitted to their respective tracks, and all the other types of papers should be submitted to the Main track.

By submitting to SEAMS, authors acknowledge that they are aware of and agree to be bound by the ACM Policy and Procedures on Plagiarism and the IEEE Plagiarism FAQ. In particular, papers submitted to SEAMS 2021 must not have been published elsewhere and must not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere whilst under consideration for SEAMS 2021. Contravention of this concurrent submission policy will be deemed a serious breach of scientific ethics, and appropriate action will be taken in all such cases. To check for double submission and plagiarism issues, the chairs reserve the right to (1) share the list of submissions with the PC Chairs of other conferences with overlapping review periods and (2) use external plagiarism detection software, under contract to the ACM or IEEE, to detect violations of these policies. By submitting to the SEAMS, authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the ACM, and the authorship policy of the IEEE.