Over the years I've noticed an interesting lack of specific domain knowledge among CS and software people. Other than the few co-workers that majored in Electrical Engineering, almost no one has heard of the field of 'Control Theory'. 
From Wikipedia
Control theory is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and mathematics, that deals with the behavior of dynamical systems. The desired output of a system is called the reference. When one or more output variables of a system need to follow a certain reference over time, a controller manipulates the inputs to a system to obtain the desired effect on the output of the system.
Let's imagine that you write internet web services for a living. Some Rest or SOAP APIs that take an input and give an output.
Your boss walks up to you one day and that asks for a system that does the following:
- Create a webservice that calls another (or three) for data/inputs, then does X with them.
- Meters the usage of the other web services.
- Your webservice must respond within Y milliseconds with good output or a NULL output.
- Support high concurrency, ie not use too many servers.
The problem is that these other third-party webservices are not your own. What is their response time? Will they give bad data? How should your webservice react to failures of the others?
Does this sound familiar? It should to many. This is the replicated-and-shared-connector problem (MySQL, memcached), the partitioned-services problem (federated search, and large scale search engines) and the API-as-a-service problem (Mashery, etc).
There are two basic types of controls relevant here:
- Open Loop, Feed-forward: Requires good model of system inputs and response of the system.
- Closed Loop, Feed-back
Types of adaptive control are as follows:
- Linear Feedback
- Stability Analysis
- Frequency response
- response time
Adaptive Schemes
- Gain Scheduling
- Model Reference Adaptive Systems
- Self-tuning regulators
- Dual Control
Here's one survey deck from a lecture. Unfortunately for software engineers, most of the presentations of the above are in linear system form rather than an algorithmic form.
Dr. Joe L Hellerstein of Google and co-workers taught a course at U of Washington in 2008 that was more software focused. He's also written a textbook on it and a few papers.
- http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/liuj/cse590k2008winter/
- Joseph L Hellerstein et al "Feedback control of computing systems" 2004 Wiley Google Books Amazon
- Hellerstein 2003 IBM Tech Report "Challenges in Control Engineering of Computing Systems"
- Hellerstein et al "Research challenges in control engineering of computing systems" Volume: 6 Issue: 4, 2010 IEEE Trans on Network and Service Management
The course page has a collection of great links to applications papers on controllers for software systems.
I'd like to see a 'software patterns' set created for easier use by software engineers. I'll attempt to present a couple common forms as patterns in a future blog post.
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