The simultaneous explosion of information and integration of technology together with the continuous evolution from software intensive systems to systems of systems and to ultra-large-scale (ULS) systems requires new and innovative approaches for building, running and managing software systems. A consequence of this continuous evolution is that software systems are expected to become more versatile, flexible, resilient, dependable, robust, or efficient by adapting to changing requirements and contexts/environments. One of the most promising approaches to achieving such properties is to equip software systems with self-managing capabilities using self-adaptation mechanisms.

Research on the theory and practice of self-adaptation is highly interdisciplinary, and it draws ideas and solutions from many diverse fields. Self-adaptive systems have been studied within the different research areas of software engineering, including requirements engineering, modeling, architecture and middleware, event-based, component-based and knowledge-based systems, testing, verification and validation, as well as software maintenance and evolution. Over the past decade several self-adaptation-related application areas and technologies have grown in importance. It is important to emphasize that in all these initiatives software has become the common element that enables the provision of self-adaptability. Thus, it is imperative to investigate systematic software engineering approaches for developing self-adaptive systems, which are---ideally---applicable across multiple domains. Hence, this seminar will concentrate on software engineering aspects of building self-adaptive and self-managing systems.

The flexible nature of software provides an ideal platform for self-adaptation. However, the proper realization of the self-adaptation functionality remains a formidable intellectual and engineering challenge. In the long run, we need to establish the foundations that enable the systematic development of future generations of self-adaptive systems. Therefore, the current achievements have to be integrated into a more comprehensive overall research effort from which generic approaches should be devised. Building self-adaptive software systems cost-effectively and in a systematic and predictable manner is also a major engineering challenge—even though self-adaptive systems have had a long history with huge successes in many different branches of engineering. Mining the rich experiences in these fields, borrowing theories from control engineering, and then applying the findings to software-intensive self-adaptive systems is a most worthwhile and promising avenue of research to solving the problems of continuous software evolution and ultra-large-scale software systems.

The goal of this seminar is therefore to bring together the leading software engineering experts and other distinguished experts from related fields on self-adaptive systems to discuss the fundamental principles, models, methods, techniques, mechanisms, state-of-the-art, and challenges for engineering self-adaptive software systems. This seminar will draw from a previous successful Dagstuhl seminar on the same topic in which a research roadmap for field was produced, and book was published.