To help developers to address the issues posed by the diversity of self-* properties and to engineer adaptive behaviors of ensembles we defined the ensemble development life cycle (EDLC) for autonomic systems. 

The life cycle comprises a “double-wheel” and two “arrows” between the wheels providing three different feedback loops: (1) at design time, (2) at runtime and (3) between the two of them.

1. Feedback loop at design time enables continuous improvement of models and code due to changing requirements and results of verification or validation.
2. The control feedback loop at runtime implements self-adaptation based on awareness about the system and its environment.
3. Finally, the feedback loop between runtime and design time “wheels” provides the mechanisms to change architectural models and code on the basis of the runtime behaviour of the continuously evolving system.

Design issues of the EDLC are grouped in requirements engineering, modeling & programming, and verification  & validation phases. They comprise activities performed offline. EDLC runtime focus on monitoring, awareness and self-adaptation of ensemble-based software systems and are performed online. The deployment and the feedback phases provide the connections between the online and offline activities.

Tools developed within the scope of the project  have been used in one or more phases of the engineering life cycle of software-intensive systems, i.e. their analysis, specification, verification, monitoring and adaptation.  and for one or more of the project case studies.  The EDLC tool phase list shows which tool is intended for which phase and for which scenarios they have been tested.