Attaining Meta-self-awareness through Assessment of Quality-of-Knowledge

Self-awareness is a crucial capability of autonomous service-based systems that enables them to self-adapt. There are different types of self-awareness whereby certain types of knowledge are captured at various levels. We argue that effective management of the trade-offs of dependability requirements can be achieved through “seamless” switching between different levels of awareness. However, the assessment of the quality of knowledge to enable dynamic switching between self-awareness levels has not been tackled yet. We propose a general architecture that exploits symbiotic simulation in order to tackle the complexity of assessing the quality of knowledge and attaining the meta-self-awareness property, wherein the system can reflect on its different levels of awareness. We conduct a thorough real-world study in the context of volunteer services. We conclude that a system made meta-self-aware using our approach achieves optimal performance by activating the most suitable awareness level. This comes at the cost of a modest computational overhead.