Autonomic communication and autonomic computing can solve many problems in managing complex network and computer systems, as well as network applications, where computing and networking co-exist. Autonomic applications must be able to automatically diagnose and repair their own faults. In particular they must be able to monitor the execution state, understand the behavior of the application and of the executing environment, and interpret monitored data to identify faults and select a repairing strategy.

Assertions have been extensively studied in software engineering for identifying deviations from the expected behaviors and thus signal anomalous outcomes. Unfortunately, classic assertions are defined statically at development time and cannot capture unpredictable changes and evolutions in the execution environment. Thus they do not easily adapt to autonomic applications.

This paper proposes a method for the automatic synthesis and adaptation of assertions from the observed behavior of an application, aimed at achieving adaptive application monitoring. We believe that this represents an important basis to derive autonomic mechanisms that can deal with unpredictable situations.