Cascade Systems as An Implementation of a Gray-Box Architecture: A Case Study in Traceability for Microservice Scaling

Jorge Jiménez Garcı́a1, Ignacio Lacalle Úbeda1, Paweł Szmeja2, Katarzyna Wasielewska-Michniewska2, Przemysław Hołda2, Maria Ganzha2, Carlos E. Palau Salvador2, Costin Bădică3, Stefka Fidanova4 and Marcin Paprzycki2

  1. Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain
    jjimgar1@upv.es, iglaub@upv.es
  2. Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
    pawel.szmeja@ibspan.waw.pl, marcin.paprzycki@ibspan.waw.pl
  3. Department of Computers and Information Technology, University of Craiova, Craiova, Romania
    badica costin@software.ucv.ro
  4. Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria
    stefka@parallel.bas.bg

Abstract

There is great potential in leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to optimize complex infrastructures, automate difficult tasks, or support autonomy and coordination between networked devices. However, advances in state-of-the-art AI often neglect features and/or requirements that businesses care deeply about, namely traceability and explainability. A majority of available research has not explored much the deployment of semi-physical architectures combining fuzzy rulebased systems with more opaque models to improve explainability, being this specially true for the management of microservices in cloud and cloud-edge environments. This contribution builds on previous work that proposes a middle ground of mixed AI architectures that combine the performance of black-box AI models with ”a more explainable overall architecture” by implementing a microservice scaling system for distributed cloud environments using a cascade approach. This work demonstrates and evaluates an application case of such an approach departing from a Service Level Agreement compliance, in a case of microservice scaling decision over cloud (and cloud-like) infrastructures.

Key words

explainability, fuzzy-rule-based-systems, semi-physical architectures, AI network, gray-box

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS250425014G

Publication information

Volume 23, Issue 1 (January 2026)
Year of Publication: 2026
ISSN: 2406-1018 (Online)
Publisher: ComSIS Consortium

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How to cite

Garcı́a, J. J., Úbeda, I. L., Szmeja, P., Wasielewska-Michniewska, K., Hołda, P., Ganzha, M., Salvador, C. E. P., Bădică, C., Fidanova, S., Paprzycki, M.: Cascade Systems as An Implementation of a Gray-Box Architecture: A Case Study in Traceability for Microservice Scaling. Computer Science and Information Systems, Vol. 23, No. 1, 561-583. (2026), https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS250425014G