Search-Based Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems: One Survey, Five Disappointments and Six Opportunities

Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) is a promising paradigm that exploits computational search to optimize different processes when engineering complex software systems. Self-adaptive system (SAS) is one category of such complex systems that permits to optimize different functional and non-functional objectives/criteria under changing environment (e.g., requirements and workload), which involves problems that are subject to search. In this regard, over years, there have been a considerable amount of work that investigates SBSE for SASs. In this paper, we provide the first systematic and comprehensive survey exclusively on SBSE for SASs, covering 3,740 papers in 27 venues from 7 repositories, which eventually leads to several key statistics from the most notable 73 primary studies in this particular field of research. Our results, surprisingly, have revealed five disappointed issues that are of utmost importance, but have been overwhelmingly ignored in existing studies. We provide evidences to justify our arguments against the disappointments and highlight six emergent, but currently under-explored opportunities for future work on SBSE for SASs. By mitigating the disappointed issues revealed in this work, together with the highlighted opportunities, we hope to be able to excite a much more significant growth on this particular research direction.