An Aspect-Oriented and Model-Driven Approach for Managing Dynamic Variability

Abstract

Abstract. Constructing and executing distributed systems that can adapt to their operating context in order to sustain provided services and the service qualities are complex tasks. Managing adaptation of multiple, interacting services is particularly difficult since these services tend to be distributed across the system, interdependent and sometimes tangled with other services. Furthermore, the exponential growth of the number of potential system configurations derived from the variabilities of each service need to be handled. Current practices of writing low-level reconfiguration scripts as part of the system code to handle run time adaptation are both error prone and time consuming and make adaptive systems difficult to validate and evolve. In this paper, we propose to combine model driven and aspect oriented techniques to better cope with the complexities of adaptive systems construction and execution, and to handle the problem of exponential growth of the number of possible configurations. Combining these techniques allows us to use high level domain abstractions, simplify the representation of variants and limit the problem pertaining to the combinatorial explosion of possible configurations. In our approach we also use models at runtime to generate the adaptation logic by comparing the current configuration of the system to a composed model representing the configuration we want to reach.

Context-Adaptive Coordination of Pervasive Services by Interpreting Models during Runtime

“…Some relevant examples are the works presented by Morin et al [8], Bencomo et al [9] and Blumendorf et al [10]. Morin et al [8] propose a combination between model-driven and aspect-oriented techniques to support dynamic runtime reconfiguration.…”

“…The XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) language has been used to make the context-adaptive task model persistent in a runtime processable technology. To facilitate the creation of the model, we have developed a graphical editor using the EMF and GMF plugins of the Eclipse platform 8 . Figure 9 shows a snapshot of this tool.…”

Engineering Secure Future Internet Services

“…However, in order to grasp a comprehensive understanding of the application as a whole, it is required to integrate all these views into a unified one. This process is called composition [25,11] and, as a recent work suggests [20], it is possible to perform it at run-time, adding a new level of flexibility and adaptation for FI applications. Regarding composition, several topics will be studied.…”

Modularity and Dynamic Adaptation of Flexibly Secure Systems: Model-Driven Adaptive Delegation in Access Control Management

“…This valid architectural model actually represents the new system state the runtime must reach to enforce the new security policy of the system. According to the classical MAPE control loop of self-adaptive applications, our reasoning process performs a comparison (using EMFCommpare) between the new architecture model (target configuration) and the current architecture model (kept synchronized with the running system) [23]. This process triggers a code generation/compilation process, and also generates a safe sequence of reconfiguration commands [22].…”