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Sensoria Bibliography Site Dynamic Software Architectures for Global Computing Systems
Antonio Bucchiarone
abstract:
Modern software systems have changed from isolated static devices to highly interconnected machines that execute their tasks in a cooperative and coordinated manner. Therefore, the structure and the behavior of these systems are dynamic with continuous changes. These systems are known as Global Computing Systems (GCSs) and they use services as fundamental elements for developing them. Software architectural models are intended to describe the structure and behavior of a system in terms of computational entities, their interactions and its composition patterns, so to reason about systems at more abstract level, disregarding implementation details. Since a GCS may change at run-time, Software Architecture (SA) models for them should be able to describe the changes of each system and to enact modifications during system execution. Such models are generally referred to as Dynamic Software Architectures (DSAs), to emphasize that the SA evolves during run-time. Several recent research efforts have focused on the dynamic aspects of software architectures providing suitable models and techniques for handling the run-time modification of the structure of a system. A large number of heterogeneous proposals for addressing dynamic architectures at many different levels of abstractions have been provided, such as programmable, ad-hoc, self-healing and self-repairing among others. It is then important to have a clear picture of the relations among these proposals by formulating them into a uniform framework. When this work started there were many questions that arise. How can we represent architectures? How can we formalise architectural styles? How can we construct style conformant architectures? How can we model software architecture reconfigurations? How can we ensure style consistency? How can we express and verify structural and behavioral architectural properties? This thesis tries to answer them. In particular it presents a formal-based process that will be used to model and verify Software Architectures that are dynamic. The principal aspects that we have considered in this work are:
- formalisms used in the design of SA that are dynamic;
- mechanisms to express and verify structural and behavioral
properties that we expect to be satisfied by each SA
configuration;
- a complete tool-supported process able to integrate previous
aspects.
These aspects are firstly illustrated over an explanatory exampl
and then applied and validated over a real-world case study.
