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http://se.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/

The Descartes Research Group was started in July 2009 by Dr.-Ing. Samuel Kounev and is mainly funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) within the Emmy Noether Programme. The group is focusing on the development of novel methods, techniques and tools for the engineering of Self-Aware Computing Systems designed for maximum dependability and efficiency. The latter are built with integrated online Quality-of-Service (QoS) prediction and proactive self-adaptation capabilities, used to enforce QoS requirements in a cost- and energy-efficient manner.

The term Quality-of-Service (QoS) is generally used to refer to non-functional system properties including performance (considering response time, throughput, scalability and efficiency) and dependability (considering, in addition to performance: availability, reliability and security aspects). Our current emphasis is on performance and availability (focusing on capacity, responsiveness, and resource/energy efficiency aspects), on the one hand, and security (focusing on intrusion detection and prevention), on the other hand.

Our main research efforts are targeted at developing: i) methods, metrics and tools for quantitative system evaluation and analysis with respect to QoS properties as defined above (including measurement, monitoring, benchmarking, and experimental system analysis in general), ii) modeling techniques for QoS prediction at run-time, and iii) novel model-based techniques and algorithms for autonomic and self-adaptive run-time QoS management.

The following pages provide an overview of our long-term vision and research agenda as well as current industry cooperations:

• Vision
• Research Agenda
• Descartes Modeling Language (DML)
• Industry Cooperations
• Poster

An overview of our vision and research roadmap can be found in the following papers:

• Engineering of Self-Aware IT Systems and Services: State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges. In Proceedings of the 8th European Performance Engineering Workshop (EPEW'11), Borrowdale, The English Lake District, October 12-13. 2011. (Keynote Talk). [ bib | .pdf ]
• Self-Aware Software and Systems Engineering: A Vision and Research Roadmap. In GI Softwaretechnik-Trends, 31(4), November 2011, ISSN 0720-8928, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2011. [ bib | .html | .pdf ]
• Towards self-aware performance and resource management in modern service-oriented systems. In Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2010), July 5-10, Miami, Florida, USA. IEEE Computer Society, 2010. [ bib | .pdf ]