Toward a software product line for affective-driven self-adaptive systems

One expected characteristic in modern systems is self-adaptation, the capability of monitoring and reacting to changes into the environment. A particular case of self-adaptation is affective-driven self-adaptation. Affective-driven self-adaptation is about having consciousness of user´s affects (emotions) and drive self-adaptation reacting to changes in those affects. Most of the previous work around self-adaptive systems deals with performance, resources, and error recovery as variables that trigger a system reaction. Moreover, most effort around affect recognition has been put towards offline analysis of affect, and to date only few applications exist that are able to infer user´s affect in real-time and trigger self-adaptation mechanisms. In response to this deficit, this work proposes a software product line approach to jump-start the development of affect-driven self-adaptive systems by offering the definition of a domain-specific architecture, a set of components (organized as a framework), and guidelines to tailor those components. Study cases with systems for learning and gaming will confirm the capability of the software product line to provide desired functionalities and qualities.