Self-adaptation is nowadays widely considered as a viable approach for dealing with run-time uncertainty and achieving requirements in the ever-changing environment. Several processes, methods, practices and tools for building self-adaptive systems have been proposed from both academia and industry to address many different problems. However, even though these solutions are effective, they are often system-specific and hardly reusable. During the architecting process, several design/architectural decisions about the managed and managing systems are primarily taken by relying on previous personal experience, rather than on a systematic approach. These decisions and the rationale behind them represent an important body of knowledge, which should be made open to practitioners and reused in other contexts. However, experience is usually unstructured and not properly reported to support its systematic reuse, then preventing practitioners to leverage on it.

To this end, AKSAS aims at turning Experience into Knowledge by collecting and organising experiences and practices from practitioners in both industry and academia. Specifically, the goal is creating a forum to (i) propose, discuss, evaluate, share, and classify design/architectural artefacts and (ii) distil a shared Architectural Knowledge packaged as a toolkit for designers/architects facing self-adaptive systems.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Comparison and evaluation of reference architectures for self-adaptive systems
• Modelling languages to represent self-adaptive systems
• Architecture Description Languages for self-adaptive systems
• Architectural artefacts for self-adaptive systems
• Knowledge on architectural patterns for building self-adaptive systems
• Modelling of adaptation strategies, tactics, or policies
• Structuring knowledge and fostering reuse of adaptation strategies and tactics
• Knowledge models of self-adaptive systems for reutilization in different domains
• Architectural decision making when building self-adaptive systems
• Knowledge evaluation and reuse on monitoring and data acquisition
• Knowledge evaluation and reuse on deliberation, planning and decision of architectural changes
• Knowledge on actuation on the system
• Knowledge on the communication between architectural elements, and between managing and managed systems
• Knowledge on measuring and evaluating self-adaptive systems

Workshop format:
The workshop starts with the presentation of accepted papers. Then, it continues with breakout discussions. During the breakout discussion participants have the opportunity to discuss their viewpoints towards establishing structured and reusable Architectural Knowledge on self-adaptive systems, to identify common concerns for collaboration, and to find out unexplored challenges.

Submission:

Papers should be submitted to EasyChair (https://easychair.org) as a single PDF file. The maximum length for papers is 6 pages in ACM style (see formatting instructions at http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template).

Submissions will be selected based on their relevance, quality, soundness and potential to develop discussion during the workshop. The ECSA 2018 workshop proceedings will be published by ACM.