Towards a Stem Architecture Description Language for Self-Adaptive Systems

In the software domain, self-adaptive systems are able to modify their behavior at run-time to respond to internal and external changes. In life science, biological cells are power entities able to adapt to the (unpredictable) situations they incur in, in a complete decentralized fashion. We are working on a new architectural paradigm for self-adaptive software systems inspired by the adaptation mechanism coming from the cell life-cycle. In order to address the complexity and the variety of self adaptive systems we found that the cell lifecycle is interesting for three main features: i) their ability to specialize behaviors starting from the most general one, i.e. the stem cell, ii) the cell ability to make regular use of the programmed death mechanism (apoptosis) to get rid of obsolete behaviors. iii) a sort of architectural principle that allows the living organisms to be very efficient systems by maintaining the right trade off between general/universal cells (stem cells)and specialized/labouring ones. In this poster paper we present our STEM paradigm by proposing new roles and architectural structure that will be part of the STEM architecture description language.