Algebraic Software Architecture Reconfiguration

Abstract

The ability of reconfiguring software architectures in order to adapt them to new requirements or a changing environment has been of growing interest, but there is still not much formal work in the area. Most existing approaches deal with run-time changes in a deficient way. The language to express computations is often at a very low level of specification, and the integration of two different formalisms for the computations and reconfigurations require sometimes substantial changes. To address these problems, we propose a uniform algebraic approach with the following characteristics.

• 1. Components are written in a high-level program design language with the usual notion of state.

• 2. The approach combines two existing frameworks— one to specify architectures, the other to rewrite labelled graphs—just through small additions to either of them.

• 3. It deals with certain typical problems such as guaranteeing that new components are introduced in the correct state (possibly transferred from the old components they replace).

• 4. It shows the relationships between reconfigurations and computations while keeping them separate, because the approach provides a semantics to a given architecture through the algebraic construction of an equivalent program, whose computations can be mirrored at the architectural level.