Ph.D. Preliminary Exam - Ganesh Ram Santhanam

Date: 20 Aug, 2009
Time: 9:00 AM
Location: 223 Atanasoff Hall
Topic: Representing and Reasoning with Preferences for Compositional Systems
Major Professor(s): Vasant Honavar


Abstract:

With the increasing complexity of systems in domains such as Web services, embedded systems, etc., monolithic development has been replaced with compositional development, where reusable, self-contained components are initially independently developed with well-defined functionality and interfaces, and later assembled or composed into larger composites or compositions.

In many compositional systems users often seek compositions that not only satisfy the given functionality, but also are optimal with respect to a set of qualitative preferences over non-functional attributes such as security, availability, etc. Typically, users provide such preferences over the valuations
(domains) of the non-functional attributes and the relative importance among various attributes of the compositional system. We develop formal methods for reasoning with user specified preferences in the context of compositional systems. We formulate and investigate three problems in compositional systems, and develop algorithms for each using the preference reasoning techniques:

Composition. To develop methods that identify the set of most preferred functionally feasible compositions with respect to user specified qualitative preferences and a given repository of components.

Substitution. To develop methods that identify the set of most preferred substitutions to replace one or more component(s) in a given composition with respect to user specified qualitative preferences and a given repository of components.

Adaptation. To investigate techniques that can adapt an existing composition with respect to changes in the userÂ’s preferences over non-functional attributes.