The feature interaction problem occurs when two or more independently developed components interact with each other in unanticipated ways, resulting in undesirable system behaviors. Feature interaction problems remain a challenge for emerging domains in cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as the Internet of Things and autonomous drones. Existing techniques for resolving feature interactions take a "winner-takes-all" approach, where one out of the conflicting features is selected as the most desirable one, and the rest are disabled. However, when multiple of the conflicting features fulfill important system requirements, being forced to select one of them can result in an undesirable system outcome. In this paper, we propose a new resolution approach that allows all of the conflicting features to continue to partially fulfill their requirements during the resolution process. In particular, our approach leverages the idea of adaptive requirement weakening, which involves one or more features temporarily weakening their level of performance in order to co-exist with the other features in a consistent manner. Given feature requirements specified in Signal Temporal Logic (STL), we propose an automated method and a runtime architecture for automatically weakening the requirements to resolve a conflict. We demonstrate our approach through case studies on feature interactions in autonomous drones.

翻译：特征交互问题是指两个或多个独立开发的组件以未预料的方式相互影响，导致系统行为出现不良后果。这一问题在信息物理系统（CPS）的新兴领域（如物联网和自主无人机）中依然构成挑战。现有解决特征交互的技术采用"赢家通吃"策略，即从冲突特征中选出一个最优特征，其余特征则被禁用。然而，当多个冲突特征均承担重要系统需求时，强制选择其中某个特征可能导致不良系统结果。本文提出一种新型解决策略，允许所有冲突特征在解决过程中继续部分满足其需求。具体而言，我们的方法利用自适应需求弱化概念，即一个或多个特征暂时降低自身性能水平，以与其他特征实现一致性共存。针对以信号时序逻辑（STL）描述的特征需求，我们提出了一种自动化方法及运行时架构，通过自动弱化需求来解决冲突。我们通过自主无人机特征交互的案例研究验证了该方法的有效性。