Challenges in applying control theory to software performance engineering for adaptive systems

Control theory has recently started to be applied to software engineering domain, mostly for managing the behavior of adaptive software systems under external disturbances. In general terms, the main advantage of control theory is that it can be formally proven that controllers achieve their goals (with certain characteristics), whereas the price to pay is that controllers and system-to-be-controlled have to be modeled by equations. The investigation of how suited are control theory techniques to address performance problems is, however, still at the beginning. In this paper we devise the main challenges behind the adoption of control theory in the context of Software Performance Engineering applied to adaptive software systems.