DESCRIPTION

The development of software systems requires means to structure them in order to leverage their complexity. This has led in the last years to different structuring means, e.g., modules, objects, components and services. Systems are then built as assemblies of these smaller and reusable entities.

Coordination addresses the description of the interactions between entities and provides developers with effective expressive means to compose them. Coordination is a hot topic in Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), e.g., for Web Services where choreography and orchestration are instances of the coordination concept. Components and services should be reusable and composable from their interfaces. Yet, basic signature based interfaces have proven insufficient for this, requiring more expressive interfaces such as Behavioural IDLs (BIDLs). BIDLs support component discovery, composability and substitutability checking. With the emergence of SOA, BIDLs have also proven to be valuable to discover and compose services. However, software entities often mismatch as they often have been developed independently from the context in which they are to be reused. This can lead to lower discovery results or deadlocking component or service architectures.

Software adaptation aims at deriving automatically pieces of software, namely adaptors, to solve component mismatch, from generated or end-user specified composition contracts. Adaptation processes usually combine solutions from different research domains, namely (i) model-based or formal approaches to develop mismatch detection and adaptor models generation algorithms, (ii) middleware technology to support the detection of mismatch at run-time and the implementation of adaptor models, and (iii) QoS and prediction models to assess the effect of adaptation on running systems. Software adaptation has been tackled mainly at the behavioural interface (protocol) level, yet it should be addressed at any interface level: signatures, behaviours, non functional properties, or semantics.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The successive WCAT editions addressed different general issues related to coordination and adaptation. For the 2008 edition we would like to address more specifically issues related to coordination and adaptation at run-time, the implementation of coordinators and adaptors, context-awareness and dynamical evolution of coordination and adaptation contracts, service composition and adaptation in pervasive computing, and autonomic computing and self-adaptive systems.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• interfaces, types and contracts supporting coordination and adaptation;
• identification and specification of interaction requirements and problems;
• behavioural interfaces, extra-functional properties;
• automatic generation of compositions or adaptors;
• formal / rigorous approaches to software adaptation;
• coordination and adaptation of services;
• coordination and adaptation in pervasive computing;
• autonomic computing and self-adaptive systems;
• relations between adaptation and the software life-cycle;
• relations between adaptation and MDE;
• relations between adaptation and AOSD;
• metrics and prediction models for software coordination and adaptation;
• prediction of the coordination and adaptation impact on Quality of Service;
• surveys, case studies, industrial or experience reports.

SUBMISIONS

WCAT calls for both technical and position papers. Technical papers should describe in depth authors’ research in the topics,  work-in-progress, and results, while position papers should describe authors’ points of view, and knowledge and experience in the field. Papers should be up to 8 pages for technical papers, and 4 pages for position papers, using the IEEE conference 2-columns style, and they must indicate the paper category (technical or position), and the authors names, affiliation and contact information.

Submissions should be sent using the workshop's electronic submission system
by June 16th, 2008. All submissions will be reviewed by the Program Committee for acceptance. Accepted papers will be published in the proceedings of the workshop (currently under negotiation with IEEE), and they will be also made available on the workshop Web site.

WORKSHOP FORMAT

Technical papers will be given 15-20 minutes for presentation, while position papers will be given 5 minutes, in both cases followed by enough time for questions and discussion. The goal is to save some time for scheduling a final breakout session in which some of the issues raised during the workshop can be discussed among the participants. In the past, these had lead to the workshop reports published in the ECOOP Workshop Readers in LNCS, and more important, to several joint research efforts among the participants resulting in works finally accepted in main conferences and journals. Finally, a dinner bringing together all the participants is planned as part of the workshop.

POST-WORKSHOP PUBLICATION

In addition to the workshop proceedings, a post-workshop journal special issue with a selection of extended technical versions of the presented papers will be scheduled, depending on the scientific quality of the contributions. The extended papers will go through a formal review and selection process. Extended papers of precedent editions have been published in L'Objet, vol. 12, n. 1, 2006 (WCAT'04) and ENTCS, vol. 189, 2007 (WCAT'06). A special issue of the J.UCS journal on WCAT'07 is under process (scheduled for September 2008).
 

June 16th 2008