Shipboard power system reconfiguration: a self-adaptation exemplar

The Shipboard Power System (SPS) is the component responsible for granting energy to navigation, communication, and operational systems. The SPS Reconfiguration is the ability to react to electrical failure and to restore critical operations for granting vessel survivability. This work illustrate why SPS Reconfiguration software system may be implemented as a self-adaptive system. To illustrate this relation we exploit a systematic classification of SPS reconfiguration methods, by highlighting terms and attributes related to self-adaptive systems. In particular, the research method considers four types of self-adaptation systems with different degrees of autonomy and proactivity. The corresponding data analysis highlights a strong correlation between SPS Reconfiguration and Self-Adaptive systems, revealing most of the SPS reconfiguration techniques found in literature often belong to three of the four types of adaptation. The outcome of the paper is proposing SPS as an interesting benchmark for comparing self-adaptive approaches, also highlighting scenarios, tasks, norms goals and quality aspects with the support of the IEEE specifications.